A Study Of Lexical Phrases In Improving Language Fluency And Language Accuracy

We find that in our country, most students who learn English have few opportunities to practice the target language in real communicative situations outside the classroom. It is also rare for learners to have chances to communicate with advanced learners, especially with foreign people. The activities undertaken in classroom are limited. Most important of all, the activities are not involved in creative role-playing in pair work or group work etc, which cannot stimulate the learners' motivation and needs to take part in. Obviously it cannot affirm them the value of the production. Then, there is not adequate output for learners to enhance fluency.The traditional teaching focuses on linguistic knowledge. Accuracy, in terms of formal correctness, is a primary goal. Fluency is not encouraged from the beginning. Learners are practiced accuracy to take national accuracy tests. The knowledge related to communication, e.g. pragmatic principles and social-culture is also ignored, which is not beneficial to the appropriateness of speech.This thesis attempts to see how to improve language fluency and accuracy from the aspects of lexical phrases. It concentrates on the college students, mainly including undergraduates and postgraduates of science. Through experiments, it is clear that there are a lot of specific problems in developing language fluency and accuracy. Based on the previous theories, we explore into the learners' knowledge of lexical phrases through analysis of their writings. The data reflect that learners fail to attach enough importance to lexical phrases.To have a deep understanding of learning and teaching situation, questionnaire has proved that learners are increasing the awareness on lexical phrases, but the teaching methodology and our course book, to some degree, could not adapt to the new change and need. In the case of learners, they need to perceive and use patterns of lexical phrases more in future study. The most significant thing is that language production is not a syntactic rule-governed process but is instead the retrieval oflarger phrasal units from memory.The third experiment demonstrates that the size of lexical phrases, to a large degree, determines the level of fluency and that the improvement of language accuracy is expected to strengthen the memory for lexical phrases. So the study gives rise to the further pedagogical implication. Teaching should be based on the idea that language production is the piecing together of ready-made units appropriate for a particular situation. Comprehension of such units is dependent on knowing the patterns to predict in different situations.Teachers will not analyze the target language in the classroom, but will be more inclined to concentrate learners' attention upon these chunks. All in all, teaching methodology involves a change in the teacher's mind. Most important, the language activities must be directed toward naturally occurring language and toward raising learners' awareness of the lexical nature of language.The development of fluency and accuracy involves many factors. The present study proves that lexical approach is an effective way to improve and balance language fluency and accuracy development. However, researchers have to take other factors into consideration to investigate that to what extent, lexical approach influences the development of language fluency and accuracy.