An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Lexical Chunks On The Idiomaticity Of Oral English

This paper makes an attempt to explore the conditions of applying the theory of lexical chunks to oral English instruction in colleges in China, in the hope of finding a more effective approach to teaching and learning of oral English for Chinese college students, as well as justifying the cognitive view of'dual-mode system'in both language acquisition and language production, which adopts both the Chomsky's emphasis on rules and Skehan' view of treating language activities as information processing procedures.As a data-driven research, the present study employs both the qualitative and quantitative approaches in carrying out an empirical research on the change of'word selections'in oral English targeted at college freshmen for the duration of two months and a half, while applying lexical chunks theory into oral English instruction. Detailed discussions and analysis are conducted, in order to make both theoretical and pedagogical contributions to oral English teaching and learning.Lexical chunks are sets of language parts which appear in a high frequency in natural language. Normally, the lexical chunks are phrases or some syntactic structures on the sentence level and are characterized by a high degree of fixed structure and meaning. It is presumed that language learning as a psychological representation activity is the functioning of a 'dual-mode system', namely the rule-based system and the exemplar-based system. The rule-based system refers to a set of limited and compact structure rules, including rules from the word and sentence level and so on. The exemplar-based system is built upon the memory of varied representations of the same sense element-the lexical chunks. These lexical chunks are stored in the human brain in forms of the whole, and can help turn the complex syntactic analysis into relatively simple chunk processing, greatly facilitate language processing and use and ease the pressure of real time language production. The language user can make adjustments to the balance point between these two systems according to specific communicative goals.In the present research, it is assumed that the research participants-138 college freshmen in Nanjing University of Science and Technology are all fully equipped with a comprehensive system of rules. As long as the lexical approach is rightly applied to their oral English instruction, their improvement in native-like idiomaticity can be guaranteed. The research participants are divided into two groups, the experiment group (EG) and the control group (CG). Both of EG and CG will get the traditional oral English instruction focusing on vocabulary and cultural background information, while only EG will get additional two-month lexical chunks training especially in oral English aspect.The final results of the experiment are supportive of the expectation. Although there is not much difference in the length of language production between EG and CG, there is evidence that the improvement of students in CG is rather independent from each other, while the majority of EG are making progress at the same time. Also the results on the accuracy of production reveal that while both the two groups made few mistakes in grammar, which fully justified our presumption of a complete system of rules, EG did much better in the usage of lexical chunks. In detail, EG used more lexical chunks, and at the same time kept a lower rate of lexical errors than CG, which fully illustrates the hypothesis of this research.On the basis of the empirical research and its relevant analysis of the causes, the author first suggests the oral English teaching should be based on a clear-cut theoretical framework, such as the lexical approach used in this experiment. Only when the students are provided with an explicit direction and specific ways to achieve the aim, can they improve their English proficiency steadily and efficiently. It is also suggested that training on lexical chunks should always be based on the students'consciousness of the concept and the importance of lexical chunks. Finally the author points out that the teaching of lexical chunks should be qualitative as well as quantitative to overcome the influence of mother tongue.