Empirical Study On Correlativity Between Small Words And Fluency In Spoken English

Lexical Approach has enabled huge quantities of natural spoken discourse to be analyzed, and this has reinforced the theory that much of our language output is not created from the smallest components but comes in the form of multi-word 'chunks' of language. Reflected in oral language, Small Words are stored and produced as such forms.This paper is devoted to fully investigate fluency strategic devices, which some discourse markers named"Small Words"function as. By using both quantitative and qualitative methods the author aims at getting a comprehensive picture of Small Words competence in spoken English Chinese English learners, meanwhile, surveying if students improve their speaking fluency by noticing and using small words. Since very little is known about the way in which learners of English in China acquire or use small words, this study is carried out to observe the use of small words by an experimental group of college students in regular classroom speaking tasks compared with students in control group in order to track down if there exists a positive correlativity between small words and oral fluency.Based on storytelling activity, SEG have better speaking fluency than SCG. And there is a high correlation between SW and fluency. According to the prepared speech activity, SEG have better performance than SCG in using SW. Later on, the recorded scripts by four top contestants in National English Speaking Competitions, the"small words"are analyzed in terms of their types, ranges, frequency and discourse functions. Students with better performance in speaking fluency have more awareness of small words, even though Small words they used were inappropriate.In addition, Chinese College students'spoken proficiency as a whole is far from satisfactory, which reflects that they ignore small words to some extent in their L2 learning. Based on these findings, some suggestions are put forward for teaching and oral testing applications to improve learners' awareness and use of small words, and spoken chunks as well.