The Lexical Phrases And Oral Fluency Of English Majors

Nowadays, lexical phrase plays a very important role in learning English,especially for English majors. And researchers are more concentrating on the study oflexical phrases.The present corpus-based study tries to find out the characteristics of Englishmajors’ oral fluency between two groups through the analysis of fiveindices(speaking rate, articulation rate, phonation/time ratio, mean length of run andaverage length of pause) and whether there is difference between the high oral fluencygroup and the low oral fluency group in the use of lexical phrases.The sample corpus of the present study is taken from the Spoken English Corpusof Chinese Learners (SECCL) which is a sub-corpus of Spoken and Written EnglishCorpus of Chinese Learners (SWELL). Based on students’ ranks, the presentresearcher chose12students whose ranks are top2as high-level group; and the other12students whose ranks are at bottom2form the low-level group. By using the CoolEdit Pro software, the researcher calculated the five indices of oral fluency of the twogroups of learners. The sample corpus of the24students was further analyzed byselecting the relevant lexical phrases according to the working definition of lexicalphrases in the present research. The data were compared and analyzed through SPSSsoftware.The findings are:(1) learners who get higher ranks have a higher oral fluencyaccording to the five indices of oral fluency.(2) u-test shows that there is significantdifference in the average frequency of lexical phrase use between the top grouplearners (4.82) and the bottom group learners (14.31). This indicates that the higheroral fluency the learners have, the more number of lexical phrases they use. There is apositive correlation between the use frequency of lexical phrases and oral fluency.The findings reveal the importance of lexical phrases in oral fluency of Chinesestudents. Based on the findings, some workable pedagogical implications related tolexical phrases use are also suggested. Language teachers should make students builda lexical phrases concept, pay more attention to the pronunciation, form and meaningof lexical phrases, and practice the lexical phrases as frequently as possible.