Relationship Between Different Annotating Way Of Lexical Phrase And Qualities Of Language Output

This study mainly focuses on the relationship among different annotating ways of lexical phrases and Chinese EFL learners'interpretation quality of lexical phrases. The purpose is to see which annotating way is better for a high quality language output, further more, the different lexical phrase types'effect on the interpretation quality.This is an empirical study with theoretical support in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition. In the literature review section, lexical phrases definition, the importance of lexical phrases are presented; while mental lexicon model by Jean Aitchison (1987: 195) and logogen model by Garman Michael (1990: 277-278) reveals the close relationship among cognitive system,semantic evidence and logogen system, which gives theoretical evidence for this empirical study.Based on the theoretical framework, the empirical study which examines 18 valid lexical phrases was performed on 76 intermediate EFL learners (from three parallel classes) for three times. The Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) and Lexical Phrase Pre-test were included before the main contrastive test to guarantee the effectiveness of this study. The data gained from all the subjects were analyzed quantitatively by SPSS tools.The findings of the study are summarized as follows: Firstly, Lexical phrases with no annotation (non-annotating way is also listed as one of the annotating ways for convenience and consistency) have the lowest language output quality for Chinese EFL learners. Secondly, lexical phrases with annotation of English explanations and English sentence examples have better language output quality; they have similar language output quality, and the second annotating way (lexical phrases with annotation of English explanations) has comparatively higher score in an overall perspective. So, we may conclude that context and semantic evidence facilitate Chinese EFL learners'interpretation of lexical phrases. More contexts provide more cognitive information thus facilitate SL learners'interpretation of lexical phrases in a more obvious way. Thirdly, different types of phrases do affect the interpretation of lexical phrases. There exist differences among three annotation ways for ploywords and phrase constraint. The second annotation way (lexical phrases with annotation of English explanations) and the third one (lexical phrases with English sentence examples)had its own advantage concerning these two types of lexical phrases. Particularly, for phrasal constraints, the similar mean mark of the second and third annotation ways (4.72, 4.45) and similar significance for"multiple comparisons"between 1, 2 and 1, 3 (0.003, 0.039) showed a similar affect for the second and third annotation ways.The above findings have some practical pedagogical implications, and contributes to the authentic language teaching and editing of language teaching materials and texts. It reveals the positive role of English explanations and English sentence examples in English reading materials for Chinese intermediate EFL. English explanations and English sentence examples may be included more in English learning and teaching materials.