Effects Of Phonemic Repetition On Chinese EFL Learners' Reproduction And Recognition Of Lexical Chunks

This study was undertaken to investigate the effects of phonemic repetition on Chinese EFL learner's reproduction and recognition of English lexical chunks. The theories on which this study is based are Noticing Hypothesis, Distinctiveness Hypothesis, Capacity Model of Attention and Memory. The significance of the study lies in two aspects: theoretically, this study can confirm the previous findings that phonemic repetition has better effect on the memorization of lexical chunks and enrich the lexis-learning and lexical chunks-learning strategies. Practically, this study can provide L2 learners with a complementary means, which facilitates learning and teaching lexical chunks.The subjects employed in this study were students receiving adult education and majoring in International Business at Yangzhou University. They were in their second year of their four-year program at Yangzhou University. The instrument employed in this study was chunks tests: the reproduction test and the recognition test. All the date analyzed in this study was obtained from the reproduction test and recognition test including 4 tasks. All the papers were scored by the researcher herself. Later the scores were calculated, compared and analyzed with the tools of Microsoft Word and SPSS to investigate the effect of phonemic repetition on L2 learner's reproduction and recognition of lexical chunks.There are two major findings yielded from the present study.The first finding is that there is a significant difference between the effects of phonemic repetition and non-phonemic repetition on Chinese EFL learners'reproduction and recognition of English lexical chunks, which means that phonemic repetition has better mnemonic effect on the reproduction and recognition of lexical chunks, immediate as well as delayed. This finding is consistent with the previous findings ( Aitchison, 1987; Cook, 2000; Boers & Lindstromberg, 2005), which may be attributed to two factors. One is that the distinctiveness and salience, which attracts one's attention easily, will facilitate memory. The other is noticing, which is the necessary and sufficient condition for converting input into intake.The second one is that four types of phonemic repetition have different mnemonic effect. Of the four types, word repetition has the best mnemonic effect while assonance has the worst, with rhyme and alliteration in between, which is in accord with Rubin, Boers and Lindstromberg. The interpretations for this maybe turn to Repetition effect, Suffix effect and Primacy-recency effect.This study provides some implications. (1) Teachers should emphasize the mnemonic effect of phonemic repetition by alerting their students to the cases with phonemic repetition in lexical chunks in teaching. (2) Learners should intentionally notice the phonological patterns of lexical chunks and actively use the particular feature of sound patterns for memory in their learning. (3) The learning tasks should be fully designed and refined to emphasize and enhance the effect of phonemic repetition on learners'intaking of lexical chunks.This study has three limitations. The first limitation lies in the test design. Though it can be guaranteed that the students do not know the meanings of all the target lexical chunks; the possibility that they may know one or two words out of the three making up target lexical chunks cannot be excluded. Additionally, the target lexical chunks should be structurally similar in this study; however, three-quarters of the target chunks are made up of three different words while a quarter are made up of two different words with the same word at either end and a preposition or conjunction in between. The second limitation is that they didn't have the same English proficiency, though none of the subjects passed CET-4 or CET-6. The third one is scoring. Though the researcher scored the translation of chunks independently and consistently according to the rating criteria, it would be better to have double scoring so that it would be more reliable.