| Speaking plays a significant role in Second Language Acquisition and oral fluency is regarded as an important index of the overall language proficiency. Recently, more and more researchers have tried to discuss and analyze various factors that may affect oral fluency from different perspectives and they all agree that lexical chunks play a positive role in enhancing oral fluency. However, few empirical studies have been concerned with the application of lexical chunks'teaching and its influence on oral fluency development. So, the present study aims to report an empirical study conducted in a Chinese context to explore the correlation between lexical chunks and oral fluency development of the Chinese college EFL learners.Based on Levelt's (1991) Model of Speech Production and Anderson's ACT Model (1983), the present empirical study adopts a longitudinal approach, explores the correlation between the use of lexical chunks and the development of L2 oral fluency by eliciting the oral production from a picture-story narration. Thirty speech samples from Chinese non-English majors of Shandong Agricultural University are examined in details to see the development of oral fluency of these learners and their use of lexical chunks as well. Data analysis on the two variables is done by SPSS 13.0. These oral material and data were used to answer the following research questions:1) To what extent does lexical chunks'teaching improve students'oral fluency development?2) Are there any correlations between the total number of lexical chunks used in speech and oral fluency?3) Are there any correlations between different types of lexical chunks and oral fluency?The present study is mainly quantitative in nature, and complemented by qualitative data. Of the quantitative data, two groups of indices to measure oral fluency were used. Temporal indices include speech rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), average length of pause (ALP), mean length of speech run (MLR) and phonation/time ratio (PTR). A linguistic index is ratio of error-free T-units (REFT). Performing indices include repairs per 100 syllables (R100) and ratio of pruned length to total length (RPL). The data was analyzed by Cool Edit 2.0 software. Moreover, the author used SPSS13.0 to testify the correlation between lexical chunks and oral fluency. An independent samples t-test was employed to probe the differences and development of oral fluency between the pretest and posttest. Pearson correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between lexical chunks and oral fluency development. Of the qualitative data, the author used subjective native speaker judgment as the supplement for the objective quantitative research.Three major findings are stated as follows:1) The use of lexical chunks contributed greatly to the development of oral fluency, and lexical chunks'teaching is better than the traditional teaching. By storing a number of frequently needed lexical chunks as individual whole units, learners could easily call up and use them without the need to compose them on-line through word selection and grammatical sequencing.2) There is a positive correlation between the number of lexical chunks and the development of L2 oral fluency.3) Only the use of sentence builders and polywords contributes significantly to L2 oral fluency, especially the use of sentence builders facilitates L2 oral fluency in many aspects.The study reveals the tendency of the development of L2 oral fluency for Chinese non-English majors in the classroom setting and the evidence proves that the use of lexical chunks and lexical chunks'teaching facilitate L2 oral fluency significantly. It is an attempt to explore linguistic features of oral fluency. It opens up the possibility of altering present College English teaching and provides the momentum to teach English oral fluency.
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