An Investigation Into Lexical Chunks In Chinese College EFL Learners' Spoken English

The concept of chunk has gone beyond the traditional meaning of vocabulary. Itrefers to a prefabricated multi-word lexical string which can be retrieved and used bylearners as a whole. Although only recently has this formulaic feature of languagebeen proved more than a marginal phenomenon and aroused much attention, moreand more researchers begin to recognize the importance of lexical chunks as anindispensable part of language, especially withthe advent of corpus linguistics whichstrongly confirms the prevalence of lexical chunks in naturally occurring language.Many researchers have arrived at a consensus that chunks are the basic units inEnglish use as well as ideal units in English learning and teaching. The introductionof the concept of lexical chunk not only reveals an important feature of language buthas also revolutionized people's views of language use and acquisition. To date, thestudy on lexical chunks has become a new trend in linguistics and languagepedagogy.Although lexical chunks have aroused much attention in recent years in China,most of those studies are in theoretical direction and few are focused on empiricalperspective. This study is a corpus-based one and it is carried out on the basis ofSWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners). It is devoted toinvestigating the chunks in 60 Chinese English learners' spoken English in anempirical way, adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods. More specifically,this study has attempted to address the following four research questions in detail:(1) Is there any significant difference in the use of lexical chunks betweenChinese English learners with different language proficiencies?(2) Do different task types lead learners to behaving differently concerning theuse of lexical chunks?(3) Is there any significant difference in the use of different types of lexicalchunks between different task types?(4) What are the characteristics and the deficiencies of Chinese learners' use oflexical chunks? The results of this investigation reveal that the higher a learner's languageproficiency is, the more chunks he/she tends to use. Chunk competence is animportant indicator of a learner's language proficiency. Chunks are often usedcontext-related; in proper context, it is usually easier for learners to produce relatedlexical chunks. Learners with different language proficiency tend to use more chunkswith pragmatic function than chunks without pragmatic function especially in a morecommunicative task. This study further points out that Chinese learners, even Englishmajors, still need to improve their chunk competence and their deficiencies in chunkcompetence is strongly reflected in the simplicity and the repetition of the chunksthey use. The findings of this study strongly confirm what has been found by someprevious theoretical and empirical studies. In the end of the thesis, the implications ofthe study for language pedagogy are discussed and practical activities for chunkteaching suggested. Some recommendations are also proposed for further study.