The Effect Of Lexical Phrases On The Oral Fluency Of The Chinese EFL Learners

After more than 30 years'development of second language acquisition, there are still very few researches on the development of oral fluency. Recently, more and more researchers began to notice and attach more importance to oral fluency, a very important index of the overall language proficiency. They have tried to discuss and analyze various factors that may affect oral fluency from different aspects and they all agree that lexical phrases play a positive role in enhancing oral fluency. However, there are still few empirical studies on this topic, and even fewer studies taking Chinese EFL learners as the subjects. The present study is aimed to investigate the oral fluency of Chinese EFL learners and the effect of their use of lexical phrases through empirical data analyses.To achieve this purpose, two groups of indices to measure oral fluency were used. Temporal indices include speech rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), average length of pause (ALP), mean length of speech run (MLR), phonation/time ratio (PTR) and average length of articulation (ALA). Performing indices include repairs per 100 syllables (R100) and ratio of pruned length to total length (RPL).An experiment and a questionnaire were applied in the present study to collect oral material and data. Altogether 80 juniors from three parallel classes of the English Department of the PLA University of Foreign Languages took part in this study, and completed both the oral task and the questionnaire as required. These oral material and data were used to answer the following research questions:1. What is the relationship between the frequency of lexical phrases Chinese EFL learners used and their oral fluency in a story-telling task?2. How do the personal factors affect oral fluency?3. What makes speakers produce more lexical phrases?The main procedures are as follows:1. The 37 records that had been finally chosen and used were transcribed into written form. And the lexical phrases appeared in the written material, number of syllables, frequency of repairs and number of pruned syllables were coded and counted.2. The wave documents of the oral material of the 37 subjects were analyzed with help of Cooledit pro2.1, a professional sound analyzing software. The values of duration of speech, pausing frequency and length of pauses were counted.3. The 37 questionnaires corresponding to the chosen records were marked.4. The values of the eight indices adopted in the present study to measure oral fluency were calculated. With the help of SPSS11.5, the descriptive analyses of the above-mentioned eight indices were carried out. And a one-sample T-test of articulation rate between the subjects and the native speakers were carried out to test whether there was significant difference.5. With the help of bivariate, correlation analyses between oral fluency and the eight measuring indices were carried out so as to test whether lexical phrases play a positive role in enhancing oral fluency.6. With the help of bivariate, correlation analysis between personal factors and oral fluency was carried out so as to test the influence of personal factors on oral fluency.7. With the help of bivariate, correlation analysis between the awareness of lexical phrases and the frequency of lexical phrases was carried out to show the relationship between these two variables.Based on these data and analyses, the following conclusions were drawn:1. The subjects as a whole lack oral fluency. There is a significant difference of articulation rate (AR) between the subjects and native speakers. Among the subjects themselves, there are also great differences of oral fluency, and the distribution on speech rate (SR), mean length of run (MLR) and average length of articulation (ALA) are uneven with most of them centering on the middle and lower level.2. Generally speaking, lexical phrases play a positive role in enhancing oral fluency measured by the two performing indices (r=.-485, -.479). This result shows that the use of lexical phrases does play a positive role in helping speakers reduce the frequency and length of repairs and thus enhancing oral fluency. However, we failed to prove the apparent positive effect of lexical phrases on enhancing the oral fluency measured by temporal indices.3. Personal factors, namely anxiety degree and familiarity with the task, negatively correlate to speaking rate (SR), articulation rate (AR) and mean length of run (MLR) (r=.372, .363, .329). This result shows that anxiety degree and familiarity with the task do affect the speakers'oral fluency measured by temporal indices.4. Speakers who are more aware of lexical phrases in daily study tend to use them more frequently in oral production (r=.351, sig.=.033).To sum up, Chinese EFL learners as a whole lack oral fluency and lexical phrases play a positive role in enhancing oral fluency to some extent. However, in China, the traditional foreign language teaching pays more attention to rules and grammars. People in general have not fully realized the importance of lexical phrases, which leads to the students'low awareness of it. This study proposes a new way to improve oral fluency through the emphasis of lexical phrases. It is hoped that the present study may help the learners as well as the teachers to attach greater importance to the effect of lexical phrases and therefore make some contributions to foreign language teaching, especially to oral teaching.