A Relative Study Of Lexical Chunks And EFL Learners' Language Output

The traditional structuralist teaching approach in which grammar is accorded priority implies that language is a dichotomy of grammar/lexicon. The disadvantage is its ignorance of language"appropriateness", because even learners have accumulated enough knowledge on grammar, words and phrases, they still may not know how to use proper utterances in certain situation. On the other hand, the communicative approach, emphasizing the communicative function of language, seems to overemphasize language fluency at the cost of accuracy, because learners lack the knowledge of grammar related to making sentences. Given this state of affairs, it seems what is needed is a sort of eclectic approach that provides some sort of middle ground in that it neglects neither.Lexical chunk is a multi-lexical meaning unit combining the features of both lexicology and grammar, with functional and contextual associations. The Lexical Approach lays great emphasis on lexical chunks. As the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts, appearing in real language output at high frequency with more fixed structures, lexical chunks play a vital role in everyday communication. Chunk study opens our eyes and provides us one of the ideal means for foreign language teaching.Therefore, this study reports a small-scale experiment that was set up to test the effectiveness of an instructional method that emphasizes"noticing"of L2 lexical chunks can help learners to promote their language output and the extent to which the use of lexical chunks can help learners come across as proficient L2 learners. The thesis includes six parts:Part one is an introduction to the background of the thesis, the significance of the research, the method used and the general organization.The second part retrospects some major researches on lexical chunks, including definition, classifications and functions of lexical chunks in product language.The third part of this thesis mainly introduces and analyzes the Lexical Approach proposed by Michael Lewis (1993) which is the theoretical basis for the experimental study.The next two chapters are the argumentation parts, including the design and result analysis of the experiment. Based on the teaching experiment conducted in the English Department in University of Jinan, the author aims to put the effectiveness of lexical chunk training to the test in a controlled experiment. Firstly, the author conducts a vocabulary test in two classes taught by the same instructor, the result of which proved that the two groups showed the same level of vocabulary ability. Then one of the two classes was randomly set as the experimental class (EC) and the other as the control class (CC). In order to ensure the validity of the experiment, both classes were exposed to the same authentic language input (audio, video and textual) and their course materials were identical. They were taught by the same teacher and received the same amount of class instruction (Before the experiment, the teacher has been trained on chunk teaching. After the training, he and the author discuss the lesson plan used in the two classes to guarantee the strict application of the lexical approach.). What was different between the two groups was that the experimental students were made aware of standardized word combinations, while in the control group the traditional grammar-lexis dichotomy was upheld. The author participated in the classroom observation to ensure the experiment was conducted according to original plan. Before and after the chunk teaching, two writings and two oral proficiency interviews (the subjects of the interviews were the top and bottom ten students in the writing pretest) were applied. The topics of the tests were chosen from IELTS while the standard for evaluation took the standard of IELTS as reference. After collecting and mixing up these test materials, two"blind judges"grade them in accordance with the same standard separately. The average score was the learner's final score. If the scores were different significantly, the judges would discuss to determine the final score. At last, the statistical software, SPSS, was used to analyze the results. The results showed that before the experiment learners in EC and CC shared same vocabulary level. However, after the experiment, learners in EC made more achievements in writing and oral tests. In addition, the correlation analysis showed that the more chunks learners used in their composition and speaking, the higher level their writing and speaking ability got.The last part is the conclusion in which the author concludes the main findings after the experiment and the pedagogical implications obtained from the research. Furthermore, the author analyzes the limitations of this study in order to apply some suggestion for the further study.The experiment shows that explicit chunk training can promote learners'language output. That it advocates to memory and accumulate a large number of lexical chunks in English learning not only can enhance learners'sense of achievement in learning English and make their language output more fluent, accurate and appropriate, but also can increase language input—the information processing efficiency of listening and reading so as to improve the automation of language information processing. Therefore, the author holds that teaching and learning of lexical chunks should be the ideal vocabulary teaching unit and lexical chunk teaching is a practical way to improve learners'English proficiency, which deserves a further study and exploration.