Research On Foreign Students’ Acquisition Of Chinese Lexical Chunks Based On Spoken Chinese Corpus

The Lexical chunk is a group of words that occurs high-frequently in the practical language communication,which can be continuous or discontinuous.It is of both syntactic and lexical features and psychological reality.The lexical chunk plays an important role in Chinese lexical teaching and learning,which is beneficial for cultivating the language sense of second language learners and helping their spoken language to be fluent and authentic.Currently,the domestic research is focused on relations between the lexical chunk and English teaching,while there is little research on the second language acquisition of Chinese lexical chunks.In addition,the research method of quantitative analysis based on corpus and experiments has not been fully put into effective use in the academic circle.The study of Chinese lexical chunks is usually concentrated on the idioms marginalized in the language system.Little attention has been paid to the large amount of lexical chunks used in the daily communication,including high-frequent collocations,set phrases and formulistic expression.As a result,there is no comprehensive study on the use of lexical chunks in foreign students’ interlanguage.Therefore,this paper presents the study of"Research on Foreign Students" Acquisition of Chinese Lexical Chunks Based on Spoken Corpus.Through the use of AntConc 3.4.1 software and corpus approach,an attempt to extract lexical chunks from the spoken corpus of foreign students and native speakers is made by a means combining machine and manual selections,truly reflecting the use of lexical chunks in foreign students’ interlanguage.The paper also presents a description and summary of the characteristics and rules during the different stages of lexical chunks acquisition by the foreign Students.Compared with native speakers’corpus,similarities and differences in using lexical chunks are compared between students and native speakers.The foreign students’ corpus is taken from the Foreign Students’ Chinese Spoken Corpus of Overseas Education College in Nanjing University.It is the midterm and final spoken language tests in the same semester.The test subjects are divided into four levels:elementary,intermediate,advanced and excellent level.The native speakers’ corpus is taken from the Contemporary Beijing Spoken Corpus developed by the Institute of Linguistics in Beijing Language and Culture University.Based on previous studies,combined with the needs of the research,the lexical chunks are extracted according to three criteria including length,frequency and integrity,divided into five categories:noun phrases,verb phrases,phrase frames,sentence frames and fixed statements.Through statistical analysis of the data,the paper’s findings are as follows:(1)Learners’ acquisition of lexical chunks is a process from quantitative to qualitative changes,featuring a slow start and unstable development.Students’ development in lexical chunks are slow in primary and advanced levels and jumping forward in intermediate and excellent levels;(2)Foreign students tend to use a large number of sentence frames with strong discourse function and phrase frames with strong generating and then the collocations at phrase level,which are mainly restrictive and high-frequent collocations;(3)The use of lexical chunks at phrase level has a high level connection with the learners’ Chinese level,while the ones at sentence level has a low level connection;(4)The lexical chunks’structural generating as well as the semantic institutionalization and length are the important factors affecting the frequency and breadth of foreign students’ using of Chinese lexical chunks.Through the comparison of the use of Chinese lexical chunks between foreign students and native speakers,the similarities are found to be as follows:(1)The amount of lexical chunks used by foreign students is almost equal to that used by the native speakers,even slightly larger;(2)The two’s average length of lexical chunks is of 3.9 characters;(3)The characteristics of high-and low-frequency lexical chunk are similar;(4)The distribution of various types of chunks is similar.Differences are mainly found in the proportions of individual types of chunks and the diversity of chunks:(1)The chunks used by native speakers are rich in categories and the forms,structures and functions more diversified,while the forms of chunks used by learners are very basic,sometimes relying on one category of chunks too much;(2)The phrase frames are used far more by foreign students than the native speakers,especially in the jumping period of the chunks development;(3)Although sentence frames are a category of the highest using percentage by foreign students,its proportion is still significantly less than that of native speakers.The sentence frames used by foreign students are unstable in the quantitative development and unclear in the diversity development;(4)Foreign students use slightly less set phrases and have little understanding of the authentic idioms used by the native speakers.Finally,through the vertical and horizontal analysis of foreign students’ chunks and its comparison with the native speakers’ using of lexical chunks,proposals are put forward for lexical chunks in teaching Chinese as a second language from three perspectives:teaching according to different stages,study resources of Chinese lexical chunks and the study strategy of lexical chunks for learners.It is hoped that this research can enrich the empirical study of the development of Chinese lexical chunks.