The Study Of The Relationship Between Lexical Chunks And The Development Of Non-English Major Learners' Oral Fluency

Recently most of the researchers have put their emphasis on the role of lexical chunks in L2 speech production. However, the relationship between lexical chunks and the development of non-English major learners'oral fluency has seldom been studied. For the present study, the researcher explores the relationship between lexical chunks and the development of non-English major learners'oral fluency based on the Levelt's Model of Speech Production (1993) and Anderson's ACT Model (1983).This empirical study was conducted to investigate the oral fluency of thirty freshmen in two classes in a professional technology institute in Dalian area through the improvisation speech, in which the subjects were required to give an improvisation speech according to the assigned topic. In the experimental group, the lexical approach was adopted on the basis of Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) with some modifications. This study consists of two oral tests, pretest and posttests, in which the researcher measured five fluency indices proposed by Towell et al. including speaking rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), phonation\time ratio (PTR), mean length of speech run (MLR), and average length of pause (ALP)(Towell, Hawwkins& Bazergui, 1996).This empirical study also aims to answer the following questions:1: After applying lexical chunks approaches in a semester's study of English, will learners'oral fluency make a remarkable improvement and how?2: Does the application of lexical chunks play a significant role in learners'oral fluency and how?Three major findings are stated as follows:(1) The use of lexical chunks played an essential role in the development of oral fluency, especially the improvements in average length of pause. In this study, the researcher found that the participants made greatest development, which is accordance with Towell et al, who maintains that L2 learners'greatest improvement lies in the learners'ability to produce longer linguistic units between pausing, instead of in the quantitative reduction in the amount of pausing (Towell et al., 1996).(2) Although L2 learners made remarkable improvements in speaking rate, while the articulation rate of them didn't perform any corresponding improvement. (3) With regard to the relationship, applying lexical chunks in the foreign language classroom, to some extent, could improve L2 learners'oral fluency and at the same time reduce the individual variations among the learners. According to the data shown in the tables, the participants didn't perform more improvement in articulation rate and mean length of speech run. While the experimental group shows shorter average length of pause, faster speaking rate and greater phonation\ time ratio compared with the control group. And hence, it can be concluded that there is a great correlation between lexical chunks and non-English majors'oral fluency in speaking rate, phonation\time ratio and average length of pause except for the articulation rate and the mean length of run.This thesis is just an attempt to explore the relationship between lexical chunks and to prove the use of lexical chunks helps students'oral fluency for oral English learning and teaching.