Lexical Chunks And Language Output

Recently the teaching and learning of vocabulary has aroused wide concern. Yet vocabulary knowledge is a multi-faceted complex; vocabulary teaching should help learners realize the global concept of what it means to know a lexical item. The depth of knowledge is a key to quality language development; however, it has been neglected in traditional vocabulary teaching. Being a major factor in the depth of vocabulary knowledge, lexical chunks have come to linguistic attention in language teaching and learning in recent years.Lexical chunks are described as"chunks"of language of varying length, variously known as lexical items, lexical phrases, prefabricated units and so on. Whatever the term, they are an important feature in language acquisition and language use and they offer advantages for language teaching. Work in corpus analysis and computational linguistics has enabled huge quantities of natural text 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, stored and produced as such. What's more, research in cognitive and psycho-linguistic research provides evidence to support the use of lexical chunks.Despite many years of English learning, and a possible mastery of 2000 to 4000 words, many English learners'language production is quite weak compared with their language comprehension. Thus this paper is aimed at addressing and probing the effect of lexical chunks on language output. The paper is mainly composed of the following six parts:The first part is a brief introduction which consists of the origin of view, the significance of the study, the method employed in the research and the organization of the thesis.The second part is a theoretical framework of lexical chunks. Although lexical chunks have been given a variety of labels and different definitions have been proposed by researchers, there is explicit agreement on its existence as an important language phenomenon. Due to the inherent difficulty in drawing clear dividing lines between various lexical chunks, there are accordingly plenty of ways to classify chunks. Because of the wide-acceptance, the...