| For learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), oral communicative ability is not necessarily well guaranteed by other receptive and productive abilities, as the former involves psychomotor flexibility in articulation as well as capability in interactive strategies. Yet in the research literature of learners'oral communication, greater vacancy remains to be filled in, by way of contrast with such areas as reading, writing, and vocabulary learning, as oral communication is of an ephemeral nature and that the learner oral communicative activities are not easy to sample and represent as valid data. Moreover, written language models are usually imposed on and used to account for spoken language. The compilation of EFL learners'oral English corpora is much justified in that they provide interested researchers with a large quantity of authentic spoken data and for investigating the EFL oral communication in its own right. Based on the Chinese Learner Spoken English Corpus (COLSEC), this dissertation constitutes an attempt to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the major features of Chinese EFL learners'spoken English.Based on the close examination and critical review of the previous theoretical and empirical studies in the field of the EFL oral communication, this study assumes that the EFL learners'oral communicative ability positively correlates with their overall proficiency and consists of an identifiable set of essential components: schemata, linguistic competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence. Linguistic competence, which is a more implicit knowledge structure that abodes in the EFL learners, includes not only the knowledge of phonology, lexis and grammar, but also the knowledge of prefabricated chunk (PC). In order to alleviate the processing cost in real-time oral communication and to save time for planning what is coming next, one has to use a large number of PCs rather than individual lexical entities. Moreover, to examine schemata,...
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