Lexical chunks, as the composites of form, meaning and function, stored and retrieved as a whole in brain, can release the language processing burden and improve the fluency and idiomaticity of language output. With the advance of corpus linguistics, the corpus is commonly used in language teaching and language research, and its function of concordance and key word in context (KWIC) can promote the acquisition of lexical chunks. The paper aims to explore the effects of the corpus-driven lexical chunks instruction in students’ lexical chunks acquisition through tow-year longitudinal study.60 freshmen of 2009 are involved in the corpus-driven lexical chunks instruction experiment, who are divided into high-level, medium-level and low-level three groups according to their writing score in pretest. At the end of each term, the writings of the students are collected for analysis. The results show us a different pattern in the use of lexical chunks for these three groups of students.
Keywords: Corpus, Data-Driven Learning, Lexical Chunks, Lexical Chunks Application Competence, Lexical Chunks Instruction
