An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Lexical Approach On Oral English Fluency For Vocational College Students

The aims of oral English teaching in vocational colleges are to cultivate students’ ability of using the language,to improve their listening and speaking skills,especially,to improve the students’ practical communication skills.Oral communicative performance mainly depends on pronunciation,intonation,enunciation,fluency,proper words,correct grammar,substantial content and clear logic.Oral fluency is one of the indicators to measure the ability of speaking among them.But for many Chinese students,especially for non-English majors in vocational colleges,it is difficult for them to accomplish a real communication task easily and fluently although they have been learning English for almost ten years.In terms of English teaching,communicative teaching method is widely used.But because of low English level of non-English majors,lecturing in large classes,the limited class time and some other factors,the implementation of the communicative teaching method is restricted.In recent years,more and more linguists realize that language output is not a process subject to the rules of syntax,but the process of extracting phrases from memory.Language is not composed of traditional grammar and vocabulary,but composed of the prefabricated chunks(Lewis,1993).At present,although lexical approach has been gradually applied to language teaching,few scholars pay attention to the use of lexical approach in oral English among non-English majors in vocational colleges.So,this thesis focuses on the use of lexical approach in oral English teaching among vocational college students and analyzes the effect of lexical approach on the oral English fluency for vocational college students.This study tries to answer the following questions through teaching experiment:(1)Compared with communicative teaching method,is lexical approach better to improve the oral fluency of non-English majors with different levels(high,middle,and low)in vocational colleges?(2)What is the effect of the type and quantity of chunk output on the oral English fluency of non-English majors with different levels(high,middle,and low)in vocational colleges?(3)What is the effect of the processing and extraction of chunks on the oral English fluency of non-English majors in vocational colleges?This study attempts to collect and analyze the data of oral tests,through the analysis of the quantitative data,to answer the above questions,and then by the analysis of the qualitative data of questionnaires and interviews,to understand the students’ attitude and opinions to lexical approach.Sixty non-English majors out of two classes in Shandong Yingcai University were chosen as participants in this empirical study.Thirty students was the experimental class and were taught by using lexical approach.Thirty students in the other class was the control class and were taught by adopting the communicative teaching method.And the time was a semester,18 weeks.In this study,it made use of oral test,questionnaire and interview to collect data to evaluate the oral English fluency of the two classes of students,and to collect the evaluation from students of the experimental class on lexical approach.At the first week,an oral test was conducted in the students in order to understand whether there was a statistical difference between the oral English performance of the two classes of students.Then the students in the experimental class were divided with high,middle and low level.Then a pre-questionnaire was carried out to understand the questions they faced when they spoke English.During the following sixteen weeks,students in experimental class were employed the lexical approach while students in the control class were applied the communicative teaching method.After seventeen weeks of implementing the experiment,students were administered the oral English test to see if there were significant differences in the oral English fluency between the two classes.Then they were required to answer the post-questionnaire in order to understand their views and evaluations on lexical approach.And during the last week,six students were selected randomly from the experimental class and were interviewed by the author in order to get to know the interviewees’ inner thoughts and motivations towards lexical approach.Through the use of SPSS 21.0,the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data led to the following findings:(1)Compared with communicative teaching method,lexical approach can promote the students’ oral English.Lexical approach can improve the oral English fluency of the students with high and middle level,but has less impact on the students with low level.(2)The increasing number of types and quantities of chunk output improves the oral English fluency of non-English majors with different levels in vocational colleges.(3)The processing and extraction of chunks on the oral English fluency of non-English majors in vocational colleges can alleviate the syntactic burden of reconstructing discourse,shortening the total time of response and improving the speed of speech and sonic velocity.Through literature review and a review of the related researches at home and abroad,this study found that the study of the effects of lexical approach on oral English fluency for vocational college students has an empirical significance.A the end of the experiment,the author recommended on the future use of lexical approach in teaching,including: focusing on core chunks,paying attention to practice in context,paying attention to communication and imitation,accumulation of chunks and so on.