The Correlation Between L2 Lexical Chunks Competence And L2 Oral Performance

This study has attempted to explore the correlation between lexical chunk competence and oral proficiency.The data used for this study were collected from 25 subjects. Two tests were constructed to measure their lexical chunk competence and oral proficiency. The competence of lexical chunks is divided into identifying competence and outputting competence. Identifying competence was measured by the number of lexical chunks identified in two passages, while the outputting competence was measured by the students' performance in blank filling and sentence translation. The English oral proficiency test included two tasks. The first task adopted a question and answer mode, while the second one was a narrative task in which the learners were asked to describe some pictures.Fluency of these oral samples was measured by speech rate, phonation/time ratio, mean length of run, average length of pause. Accuracy was measured by the ratio of error-free verbs and ratio of error-free clauses. Oral complexity was measured by type/token ratio and the number of clauses per c-unit. Pearson correlations were examined between the six indicators and scores on identifying and outputting lexical chunks.Findings of the study showed that there were significant correlations between lexical chunk competence and oral fluency, accuracy and complexity. Among the four fluency indicators, average length of pause is most closely correlated with competence in identifying lexical chunks; while speech rate is more closely associated with competence in outputting than the other three indicators. The correlation between the ratio of error-free verbs and scores in outputting lexical chunks is stronger than that between the ratio of error-free clauses and scores in outputting. As for scores in identifying, it was only found to be significantly correlated with the ratio of error-free verbs. The complexity indicators were both correlated with the scores on outputting lexical chunk competence. The correlation between the number of clauses per c-unit and scores on outputting is a stronger correlation than any other correlations in this study. Only the number of clauses per c-unit is associated with scores on identifying lexical chunks. Implications and suggestions for further research and L2 teaching are discussed based on the research findings,.