The Use Of Lexical Phrases In Chinese EFL Learners' Oral English

Lexical phrase is a language phenomenon which is larger than a word, and appeared in real communications with a high frequency. It has the advantage of combining grammar, semantics and context. With its fixed form, lexical phrase is prone to be stored and picked up from the memory. However, most Chinese students, even some teachers do not pay much attention to this language phenomenon. This study is carried out to explore the present condition of the use of lexical phrases in Chinese EFL learners' oral English.This research is based on Nattinger and DeCarrico's theory, in which the author adopts Nattinger and DeCarrico's classification of lexical phrases. A quantitative approach is used to investigate the characteristics of lexical phrases in Chinese EFL learners' oral English. This study focuses on these questions:What role do lexical phrases play in oral English? What are the characteristics of lexical phrases used by Chinese EFL learners in oral performance? What are the differences in the use of lexical phrases between Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels? What is the relationship between the frequency of using lexical phrases and the proficiency level of Chinese learners?Data for this study are collected from the corpus SECCL. It contains 18 audio digital files from the 2006 TEM8 oral test. Based on the final scores of the oral test, the 18 samples are divided into three small groups for comparing different levels of learners in using lexical phrases. Also,8 samples of native speakers'oral performance are collected for reference and for comparison.Data and analysis indicates that lexical phrases contribute to the fluency, accuracy and better understanding of oral English. The lexical phrases used by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers differs greatly, and the use of lexical phrases by different levels of EFL learners are not quite similar. Native speakers use numerous and various lexical phrases in their oral English. Chinese EFL learners use fewer numbers and types of lexical phrases than native speakers. Therefore, it can be get that Chinese learners have poor ability of using lexical phrases in oral expressions. Among the form-oriented classification of lexical phrases, sentence builders is most frequently used by Chinese EFL learners than the other three types. Learners at higher proficiency level use more lexical phrases and types than learners at lower levels. Higher achievers tend to use sentence-level phrases while lower achievers tend to use word-level lexical phrases in oral expressions. The frequency of lexical phrases and the proficiency level of Chinese EFL learners are significantly correlated. Lexical phrases have positive effects on high scores of oral English. On the basis of the above findings, the author give the following suggestions on teaching: Teachers need to teach more lexical phrases to the beginners, in order to improve foreign language learners'abilities of discourse structuring and syntactic analysis. Teachers should well-arrange language teaching activities and consciously cultivate students' ability of using lexical phrases effectively in communication. In the process of conversation teaching, teachers should teach vocabularies in forms of lexical phrases, which can diversify the storage of words by the students.However, this study is only a tentative research on the use of lexical phrases in Chinese EFL learners' oral English, in which the limitations of data collection, data analysis and discussions are inevitable. The materials used in this study are only test-setting ones, so the results are affected by the narrow collection of the corpus. Besides, the assumptions and conclusions in the research need to be further studied in the future.