An Empirical Study Of The Lexical Approach To Oral English Fluency For Senior High School Students

Fluency,one of the representations of language competence of second language learners,is the main research field of second language acquisition.Fluency,as an important indicator for evaluation of English linguistic competence,deserves the learners’ attention.The oral English teaching is gradually gaining attention and people are beginning to explore proven methods of oral English teaching.In recent years,researchers have tried to introduce chunks into oral English teaching other than traditional phonetics research.Functioning as the basic unit of language,chunks play an essential role in language acquisition and communication.The chunks have relatively fixed structures and meanings,which can be memorized and stored in the brain according to different pragmatic functions.Language users can extract and use them according to the context,which largely improves the fluency of language expression.Based on this,the study of the lexical approach to oral English fluency is of great significance both theoretically and practically.This study conducts an empirical study of the lexical approach to oral English fluency for senior high school students.Meanwhile,this study further researches the impact of the use of chunks on oral English fluency.The following four research questions are explored in the present study.（1）What are the changes in the number,diversity,and frequency of chunks in students’ oral expressions after applying of the lexical approach?（2）What are the differences in students’ oral English fluency after applying of the lexical approach according to the temporal indicators?（3）What are the differences in students’ oral English fluency after applying of the lexical approach according to the linguistic indicators?（4）What are the differences in students’ oral English fluency after after applying of the lexical approach according to the expressive indicators?The research approaches used in this study are tests,questionnaires,and interviews.This research selected two classes in a senior high school in Dalian as the research participants.The experiment lasted for four months.The two classes were tested before the research,and the results showed no significant difference in the students’ oral English proficiency in the two classes.One of the classes was the experimental class in which the lexical approach was adopted,while the other was the control class in which the traditional teaching method was adopted.After the experiment,the two classes were post-tested,and their language materials were recorded using Cool Edit Pro 2.1 and transcribed.Afterwards the data were analyzed by using SPSS 25.0.The results of the research have shown that the number,diversity,and frequency of chunks had increased significantly,and students’ competence by using chunks has been enhanced after systematical learning.Among the eleven fluency indicator,eight indicators show significant differences,while the three did not.In the five temporal indicators,there were significant increases in speaking rate（SR）,articulation rate（AR）,phonation/time ratio（PTR）,mean length of run（MLR）,and the average length of pause（ALP）.This shows that the increase in the number of chunks significantly enhances the ability to fill utterances and reduces the time used for utterance planning,which is of great help in reducing encoding load,shortening pause time,increasing the length of run,and improving speaking rate effectively.In the three linguistic indicators,the mean length of c-units after pruning（MLCP）and subordinate-clauses per T-unit（SCT）are significantly different,which indicates that the diversity of chunks enriches the complexity of the syntactic structure and the richness of the language.And the ratio of error-free T-units（REFT）presents a slight change.This suggests that it is difficult to improve language accuracy in the short term and it requires a certain amount of practice and repetition to be effective.In the three expressive indicators,the ratio of reformulation and replacement to total repairs（RRR）has a significant difference.It indicates that chunks can provide students with the basic structure of the language so that students can avoid mistakes in improper language use and reduce changes of repairs.The repairs per 100 syllables（R100）and the ratio of pruned length to total length（RPL）show slight changes without significant differences.This is due to the fact that the research participants would repeat words multiple times to gain time for information processing and speech planning while increasing the speaking rate and reducing pauses.The study indicates that the lexical approach can improve students’ oral English fluency.The lexical approach has a positive influence on students’ English speaking competence.The findings in the present research have provided teachers with practical pedagogical implications,teachers can apply the lexical approach to enhance students’ awareness of chunks and construct contexts by using chunks to cultivate students’ English cultural awareness,which can increase their oral fluency.Nevertheless,limitations still exist in research time,the number of research participants,and research methodology.Thus,future studies can extend the research time,increase the number of research participants and use multiple testing approaches so that the effects of the lexical approach on oral English fluency for senior high school students can be further explored.