An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Lexical Chunks And The Quality Of EFL Learners' Language Output

The teaching approach whose center is grammar implies that language is a dichotomy of grammar / lexicon, that is, the basic frame is grammar, and the lexicon is the filler. The disadvantage of this approach is lack of "appropriateness", because after learners have accumulated a lot of knowledge on grammar, words and phrases, they still may not use proper utterances in certain situation appropriately. The communicative approach emphasizes the communicative function and it is lack of the knowledge of grammar related to making sentences. Given this state of affairs, it seems what is needed is an approach that provides some sort of middle ground in that it neglects neither. Lexical chunk is a composite of grammar, meaning and contexts, so the lexical approach is an efficient way to synthesize knowledge and application to avoid the above two extremes. Lexical chunk study opens our eyes and provides us an ideal approach for foreign language teaching.Large-scale statistic analyses of real language materials in recent 20 years have shown that 70 percent of natural utterances are completed by the semi-fixed "chunks" existing between words and fixed phrases (Altenberg, 1991). Various types of lexical chunks with rather fixed meanings occupy 90 percent of daily language (杨玉晨, 1999). Native speakers reserve large chunks in their minds. In oral English, those prefabricated chunks constitute its main part, while only a few are "created" promptly (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). So, with the development of Corpus Linguistics, the status and role of lexical chunks in language acquisition and application have become an important topic in applied linguistics.The history of the studies of lexical chunks in China is not long. Up to now there have not been a lot of substantial studies focusing on the relationship between lexical...