A Comparative Analysis Of Use Of Lexical Chunks By English Majors In Their Oral And Written Narrative Productions On The Same Topic

This study seeks to investigate the use of lexical chunks by English majors in their oral and written narrative productions, with the primary focus on the description on the general characteristics of lexical chunks identified in speaking and writing, and a secondary focus on differences in the use of lexical chunks between learners’utterances and writings, and between higher achievers and lower achievers. Correlation analysis was also conducted to examine the relationships between the learners’use of lexical chunks and their oral and written narrative performances.The data used for this study consist of two parts, namely the spoken and the written. The oral data were42cases selected from SWECCL, a learner corpus. The written data were37pieces of writing elicited from sophomores of English majors. Both oral and written data were regrouped into higher and lower levels according to the learners’performances. The analytical framework for the data analysis was based on the conceptual classification of lexical chunks by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), and Lewis (1997). The chunks identified in the data analysis were classified and labeled as polywords, phrasal constraints, institutionalized expressions and sentence builders. The data analysis yielded the following findings:Firstly, the frequency of use of lexical chunks identified indicates that the learners used more chunks in their written narratives, suggesting that online oral production is more challenging in terms of time limit. Of the identified lexical chunks, they used more word-level chunks than sentence-level chunks, most likely because of word-level chunks are comparatively short and rather fixed and thus easier for the learners to retrieve from their long-term memory. The type/token ratio shows that the variety of chunks in the writings is a little higher than that in the utterances. Detailed analysis reveals that almost more than half of the chunks identified in both utterances and writings were used more than once, and some of them were repeated for many times, such as I think, one day, etc.Secondly, as shown in the results of the independent samples t-test, there is a significant difference in the frequency of lexical chunks between the learners’oral and written narratives. In terms of the frequency of use of each category, significant differences were also found that each of the categories was used more in the written narratives compared to its counterparts in the narrative utterances.Thirdly, the cross-level comparison of lexical chunks used in the spoken narratives shows there is a significant difference in the frequency of use of lexical chunks between higher-and lower-level learners, and higher-levels employed more lexical chunks than lower-levels in their spoken narratives. In terms of each category, significant differences were found in the polywords, phrasal constraints, and sentence builders. These differences may be related to the gap in the learners’oral proficiency.Likewise, there is a significant difference in the frequency of use of lexical chunks between the learners of different levels in their written narratives. However, in terms of each category, significant differences are only found in the frequency of use of phrasal constraints and sentence builders, suggesting that the higher-level learners were able to focus more on the use of chunks as discourse markers to make their writings more coherent.Finally, the results of the correlation analysis reveal that the learners’use of lexical chunks is positively correlated with both their oral and written narrative performance. In terms of speaking, their use of polywords and phrasal constraints is positively correlated to their oral performances. In terms of writing, their use of phrasal constraints has a significant correlation with their writing performances.Pedagogically, this study may have at least three implications:1) The traditional practice of language learning should not be totally abandoned, such as a traditional practice as memorizing some basic phrases or sentences, which are somehow effective in promoting the learners’ speaking and writing.2) The teachers may choose to use different types of chunks to examine their linguistic accuracy and lexical variety in their speaking and writing.3) The teachers may encourage the students to use chunks to develop their discourse competence, both oral and written, but should remind them of not being over-dependent on fixed linguistic knowledge to improve their language proficiency.