On Final Speakers' Use Of Lexical Chunks In 2008 "CCTV" Cup English Speaking Contest

Lexical chunks refer to language units which appear with high frequency in languages. Generally speaking, lexical chunks are memorized as a whole, and stored as read-made units in people's mind, which is quite available for speakers to retrieve from memory. In the past, lexical chunks were considered a marginal phenomenon in language for a long time, and little attention has been received on lexical chunks in language teaching and learning. However, in recent years, with the development of Corpus Linguistics, researchers find that lexical chunks abound in language use. Accordingly, numerous researches on Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics and other related areas focus on lexical chunks. However, the features of learners'use of lexical chunks and the practical value of lexical chunks on English teaching have yet to be proved.Based on the above, this study aimed to study the features of the use of lexical chunks in prepared and impromptu speeches in the English speaking contest through qualitative and quantitative analysis.The paper studied the features of Chinese college students'use of lexical chunks in"2008 CCTV Cup"English speech final competition, including both prepared and impromptu speeches. The findings are that, on the whole, Chinese students tended to use more phrasal constraints and sentence builders. Sentence builders and polywords were more often used in impromptu speeches that those in prepared speeches, and the reverse was true of phrasal constraints and institutionalized expressions. As to the variety of lexical chunk use, phrasal constraints topped others; however, a lack of richness was identified in the use of institutionalized expressions and polywords.In the conclusion part, based on the research findings, some suggestions on English teaching were proposed. What's more, limitations of the present research and expectations for the further researches were also pointed out.