A Preliminary Study On The Influence Of Lexical Chunk On The Development Of Adults' Oral English Proficiency

Lexical chunks refer to those multi-word units with relatively fixed form.Lexical chunks are usually prefabricated units which are stored and memorized as a whole.They are convenient and useful for speaker to retrieve from memory to generate spoken language.The development of corpus linguistics shows that 70 percent of natural utterances are completed by the semi-fixed "chunks" existing between words and fixed phrases (Altenberg,1991).Native speakers have large number of chunks in their language system.In oral English, those prefabricated chunks constitute its main part, while only a few are "created" promptly (Nattinger & DeCarrico,1992).So some applied linguistics began to pay close attention to re-examine language from the angle of lexical chunk. Lewis(1993) proposes that lexical chunks learning and teaching can improve learners' language proficiency by the means of lexical approach.Whether oral proficiency, as one of the important goals of foreign language teaching, could be improved by the means of lexical approach began to draw close attention from researchers.In China, this kind of research is still not much.This study was accomplished to examine whether the lexical chunks could improve adult learners'oral proficiency. Two classes of adult learners participated in this experiment which lasted ten weeks with a hundred periods.The teaching methodology of the experimental class was lexical approach while the teaching methodology of the control class was functional approach.Pretests and posttests according to CET4 marking scheme were finished before and after the experiment. The data analysis procedures are as follows: 1)the result of the independent samples T-test of between the pretest scores of the subjects of the control class and the experimental class shows that the oral proficiency levels of the control class and the experimental class have not significant difference from each other, thus these two classes are suitable for the pedagogical experiment; 2) the result of the two paired samples T-tests of between the pretest scores and the posttest scores of the control class and the experimental class shows that both classes have progressed significantly with their oral proficiency; 3)the result of another independent samples T-test of between the control class and the experimental class on their pre-and posttest score differences shows that the oral proficiency level of the experimental class progressed better than its counterpart of the control class.The researcher hopes that this study can to some degree help to expand the range to improve spoken language teaching and learning.