The Corpus-based Applicational Analysis Of Chinese English Learners' Speech Chunks

Nowadays more and more researchers found that most of what people say in their daily conversation consists of formulaic expressions, which are named as chunks. It can be characterized as overall extraction, using frequently, vocabulary-grammaticalization and culture-relatedness. They manifest themselves as an indispensable part of language, especially with the development of corpus linguistics which strongly confirms the prevalence of chunks in natural language. However, there is still a lack of empirical studies to present a comprehensive picture of the speech chunks by English learners in China. In order to make up for that, the present study is to study Chinese learners'speech chunks based on corpus data by answering such questions as what the chunk is in corpus analyzing process, what is the relation between chunks and oral communication, whether or not the chunk is useful for fluency and accuracy in oral communication, what the implications of the present study are in both academic and pedagogical fields, etc.In order to verify the complex internal connection with accuracy and fluency in oral communication, the writer empirically studied the chunks in 100 Chinese English learners' spoken English from SECCL( Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners) of SWECCL ( Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners ), with both qualitative and quantitative methods, constantly sorting, contrasting, analyzing the correlated data and doing statistical work on them according to the criteria for evaluating verbal ability ( accuracy, fluency,etc.). The study analyzes the relevancy of each factor with the use of chunks by using SPSS, and then tests the function of chunks to each variable in oral communication. It's shown that the use of chunks can improve accuracy and fluency in oral communication. Errors and some disfluent phenomena would occur when the speaker has difficulty in retrieving proper chunks from memory in oral communication.Practically, the positive correlation between chunk and fluency suggests that chunk could be employed as a strategy to improve L2 learners' oral fluency. Thus, further explorations have also been made on how to introduce chunks into oral English teaching and how to conduct systematic chunk teaching in oral classes. Finally, the findings of this study may also provide some insights for oral English textbook writing.