A Study Of Lexical Phrases On Facilitating Listening Comprehension

The dissertation is a study of the function of English lexical phrases on facilitating listening comprehension.Although lexical phrase is labeled in different ways by different researchers, in the dissertation, all the linguistic units, larger than single words, having integral form, idiomatically determined meaning and pragmatic function, and occurring frequently are regarded as lexical phrases. Many researchers ( Nattinger 1980, 1992; DeCarrico 1992; Lewis 1993, 1997; Sinclair 1988; Willis 1990, etc.) have researched on lexical phrases and particularly the researches of Michael Lewis (1993,1997) and Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) have laid theoretical foundations for the later research on lexical phrases.The research on the functions of lexical phrases in language learning is relatively new and still not systematical. And most of current researches mainly focus on the function of lexical phrases on improving learners' productive skills (e.g. Nattinger 1980; Lewis 1993; Lian Jie 2001; Zhang Jianqin 2004; Li Taizhi 2006, etc.).However, there is hardly any research on the function of lexical phrases on improving learners' receptive skills, especially their listening skills.Listening is a basic step to acquire language, and also an essential component of human beings' communicative competence. However, most English learners in China, even those with advanced English level, find it difficult to understand the spoken discourse (Chen 2004), especially transactional spoken discourse.Therefore it's necessary to find some ways to facilitate listeners' comprehension of spoken discourse. The dissertation makes use of some theories of the lexical phrases and listening comprehension, combining the researches on spoken discourse and aims at finding a new...