A Correlational Study On College Students’ Ability Of Noticing And Identifying Lexical Chunks And Their Reading Ability

Lexical chunks have both lexical and grammatical features and can be memorized and retrieved as a whole by learners without generation or analysis by grammatical rules. This feature makes language researchers continue to study this language phenomenon and its important role in language acquisition. In recent years, the study of lexical chunks has been regarded as a promising field in both theoretical study and pedagogical practice.Research of lexical chunks in China mainly focuses on the correlation between chunks and writing, chunks and oral English output and it has already obtained fruitful achievements at present. However, the correlation between lexical chunks and reading comprehension ability still needs further study and demonstration, specifically the correlation between learners’ psychological process of learning and using lexical chunks and their reading ability.The purpose of this study is to investigate how learners notice and identify lexical chunks in the process of reading and to explore and analyze the causes. The researcher also wants to find out whether there are some correlations between learners’ability of noticing and identifying lexical chunks and their reading ability. Through the experiment, this thesis tries to answer three questions:(1) Do the learners have consciousness of lexical chunks while reading? Will they notice lexical chunks? What kind of lexical chunks will they notice?(2) Are the learners able to identify lexical chunks while reading? What kind of lexical chunks will be comparatively easy to identify?(3) Are there any correlations between their ability of noticing and identifying lexical chunks and their reading ability?The subjects of this research were sophomores of English majors at Normal College of Jishou University. On the basis of CET4scores along with their scores of intensive and extensive reading in the last semester, they were divided into Group A and Group B which represented the high level learners and the low level learners. The study involved two tasks. The first task was to let the subjects read two passages from English extensive textbooks, and then complete the reading comprehension questions. The second task was to require the subjects to underline the language points in the two passages. The researcher classified the language points and calculated the type and quantity of lexical chunks the subjects noticed and identified. Then the researcher analyzed the data collected. In order to explore the psychological process and make certain the reasons, the researcher also selected some students to have an interview. The results are as follows:(1) The learners have awareness of lexical chunks in reading and they will notice lexical chunks. They tend to pay attention to chunks worth learning and chunks retriggering association.(2) They are able to identify the chunks and what they can identify most are polywords and phrasal constraints.(3) There is a strong correlation between the learners’ ability of noticing and identifying lexical chunks and their reading ability. That is to say, the more chunks have been noticed and identified, the better the reading comprehension ability is. It also proves that there are some differences between the high level and the low level learners in noticing and identifying lexical chunks.There are five chapters in the thesis. Chapter one presents an introduction which includes the background of the research, the significance and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two provides a related literature review of the research on the previous studies of lexical chunks, in which it outlines some concepts and the theoretic frameworks. The former includes the definition of reading, reading ability and lexical chunks, the classifications and functions of lexical chunks and the latter is the theoretic frameworks from different perspectives. At the end of the chapter previous studies abroad and at home are given. Chapter three introduces the research questions and the research subjects and instruments involved in the experiment. In addition, it gives a detailed description concerning how the data are collected and analyzed. Chapter four analyzes the data collected in the experiment and discusses the results in answer to the research questions put forward previously. Chapter five gives a summary of the major findings and points out the limitations and some language pedagogy and acquisition implications of the study as well as some recommendations for future research.