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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Recently, with the development of corpus linguistics, linguists home and abroad paymore attention to lexical chunks in language acquisition and application. It is discoveredby the psycholinguists that a great many prefabricated patterns stored in human brain,and generally these lexical units are composed of more than one word and convey moreinformation than isolated words. And corpora studies reveal that about 60 percent dailyoral expressions and about 50 percent written language are made up of prefabricatedlexical chunks (Erman, 2007). Lexical chunks, no matter what researchers called them, areimportant units in the use of language and acquisition of language as well. Many studieshave been conducted to testify the role of lexical chunks. To name a few, Krashen (1978)carries out a research on language acquisition and finds that children acquire chunksfirstly in the process of language development in their early stage. Another study byMoon (1998) on corpus linguistics demonstrates that lexical chunks constitute the basicelements of language. And in everyday life, what people frequently use in theircommunication is fixed patterns (lexical chunks) rather than sentences made up ofvocabulary and grammar. Another experiment conducted by Altenberg and Granger(2001) reveals that more that half of the daily expressions are chunks, and the store oflexical chunks can improve the accuracy and fluency of communication. Lewis (1993)also holds the opinion that chunks are the basic units of language and word collocationhas positive relationship with the proficiency in actual use of language. The aboveresearches stress the important role of lexical chunks in language acquisition and offer anew perspective for English writing teaching and learning.
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1.2 Objectives of the Study
How can learners improve their writing within limited time，reduce mistakes as manyas possible and make their writing much more idiomatic? How can non-English majorstudents acquire fluency and choose words and expressions like native writers?As a traditional learning approach in the mother tongue in China, recitation is putforward in this study aiming at yielding fruitful results that would shed light on thesolution to the current written English learning. As a new method, the recitation ofprefabricated chunks is expected to shed some new light on the issue of how to enhancecollege students' writing. It argues that language learners should try to memorize andaccumulate numerous prefabricated chunks for this will not only greatly improve theprocessing efficiency of their input, but also increase their sense of achievement when theiroutput becomes smoother, more accurate, appropriate and idiomatic. So the head priorityfor students of non-English major is to memorize the ready-made chunks, improve theirlexical chunks in order to enhance their writing proficiency.The current study is to explore whether there is a correlation between recitation oflexical chunks and writing proficiency and to discuss how recitation of lexical chunks canbe applied in the teaching of college English writing and the implication of the study aswell. With the application of chunks recitation, the researcher tries to testify the effects ofchunks recitation approach in the writing process which stresses the using of long-termme本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。