Lexical Phrases And A Suggested Oral English Dictionary

Oral proficiency, particularly fluency and idiomaticity, is always regarded as the aim to be achieved by all English learners and as a hard problem in foreign language teaching. Nowadays more and more researchers have devoted to work on oral study from various aspects. Many people have done research from lexical phrase perspective and drawn positive conclusions that lexical phrases play very important roles in language communication and the proper use of lexical phrases is essential to English learners'oral fluency and idiomaticity.Since the study of lexical phrases is an effective way to improve EFL learners'oral productive ability, it is essential for them to grasp large numbers of lexical phrases. However, the lexical phrases the EFL learners pick up in their routine study are neither systematic nor holistic so that they are insufficient in benefiting the EFL learners a lot in improving their oral productive ability. Besides, the existing oral English dictionaries are decoding and passive ones which are limited in lexical phrase consideration and in many other aspects. A new dictionary taking lexical phrases as entries is thus necessary. It will help EFL learners a lot in grasping large number of lexical phrases to meet their everyday need.The central purpose of this paper is to argue about the necessity and possibility of a suggested oral English dictionary taking lexical phrases as entries. Different from all the existing oral English dictionaries, the dictionary suggested is an encoding one, active in function, and designed for both comprehension and production. In the process of dictionary compiling, British National Corpus (BNC) is utilized. Finally, a framework of the dictionary is provided.