The Effects Of Lexical Chunks On Non-English Major Learners' Oral Fluency

Lexical chunks refer to those multi-word units with relatively fixed form. Generally, lexical chunks are memorized as a whole, and stored as prefabricated units in people's mind, which is quite useful for speakers to retrieve from memory. In recent years, with the development of corpus linguistics, researchers find that there is a widespread occurrence of lexical chunks in language use. Meanwhile, the language phenomenon catches so many applied linguists'attention that people begin to reconsider the nature of language. The traditionally grammatical view of language is greatly challenged by lexical view of language. Lewis (1993) points out that language is not a system of lexicalized grammar, but a system of grammaticalized lexis. Besides, Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) and Lewis (1993) propose a new teaching approach: lexical approach. They maintain that applying lexical chunks in language teaching can improve learners'language proficiency, and they also provide some practical teaching methods including teaching principles and teaching activities. However, the true value of this approach in foreign language classroom setting needs proving. Furthermore, oral fluency is one of the most important aims of foreign language teaching, whether applying lexical chunks in oral language teaching can improve the learners'oral fluency is still an open question.The present empirical study was conducted to examine whether the lexical chunks could improve non-English major college learners'oral fluency. Two classes of first-year college learners participated in this experiment, which lasted eight weeks. The teaching methodology in the experimental group was based on the lexical approach proposed by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), with some modifications. Two oral tests were conducted before and after the experiment. Considering the great amount of work involved in such a detailed description of measuring oral fluency and limited time period, the author merely selected fifteen subjects in each group at random. And the subjects'oral presentations were recorded and transcribed for the further analysis of oral fluency. The author primarily measured oral fluency through five fluency indices: speaking rate, articulation rate, phonation / time ratio, mean length of run and average length of pause.The results showed that the subjects in the experimental group could speak more fluently than those in the control group. Lexical chunks can develop non-English major learners'oral fluency to some extent. This present study just makes an attempt to apply the lexical chunks into oral language teaching. Hopefully, this research can provide some implications for oral English learning and teaching.