A Study On The Effectiveness Of The Lexical Chunks Instruction In Improving College Students' Oral Proficiency

One of the prominent problems in English learning with college students is that most of them are poor in English speaking. Even those who have been learning English for nearly ten years and have mastered a certain range of vocabulary can not speak fluently. It is not uncommon that inappropriate and non-idiomatic English usage appears in their speaking and writing. It reminds the college English teachers that the most urgent need in English teaching at present is to improve students'oral proficiency. Lexical chunks, as a multi-word lexical phenomena, exist in human languages universally and play a vital role in everyday communication. The lexical chunks instruction claims that lexical chunks ought to be the core of language teaching instead of individual words and grammar. Language teaching should direct students'attention to lexical chunks such as word combinations, collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions. The lexical chunks instruction has attracted increasing interests among foreign language experts and teachers, due to its belief that it is leaners'chunk competence that helps them speak with fluency and appropriateness. Although there have been a lot of theoretical discussions on the important role of lexical chunks in language learning and teaching, there are still not enough empirical studies to verify its effectiveness in application.This thesis explores the feasibility and effectiveness of the lexical chunks instruction in improving college students'oral proficiency. An experimental teaching was conducted for one semester. There were 60 sophomores of non-English majors selected as subjects. They were rearranged into two classes: the experimental class (EC) and the control class (CC), both of which were ensured to have the same English proficiency level. The lexical chunks instruction was applied to EC and the traditional teaching method was applied to CC as a contrast. Special focus was laid on raising the EC students'awareness of chunks and on teaching them how to identify chunks, how to memorize chunks, how to use chunks through a series of specially-designed exercises and classroom activities. Two oral proficiency tests (a pretest and a posttest) were performed in both EC and CC. The scores were collected as data, which was processed by using the SPSS 16.0. A comparative analysis was undertaken on the results of the oral tests. The results of the two oral tests showed that the students in the EC achieved statistically significant improvement in the posttest, while there was no significant difference between EC and CC in the pretest. The analysis on the status of chunk use showed that the EC students had more variation of chunks, which indicated that noticeable improvement had been achieved in the lexical richness. Learning chunks was proved to be an effective lexical learning strategy. The analysis also showed that chunks of necessary topics made up the majority of lexical chunks that the students had used in the posttest, which indicated that chunks of social interactions and discourse devices remained to be developed in the future teaching.A questionnaire about the EC students'lexical learning strategies was carried out at the beginning to confirm its correlation with their English proficiency. It was found through the questionnaire that there is, to a great degree, a correlation between the students'lexical learning strategies and their English proficiency level. An interview with the EC students were carried out at the end in order to investigate their opinions on the lexis-based teaching approach. The results of the interview proved that the lexical chunks instruction had shaped their confidence in English speaking and enhanced their motivations in English learning. The study finally confirmed that the lexical chunks instruction had positive effects on students'oral proficiency.