The Study On English Majors' Use Of Lexical Chunks In Spoken English

Lexical chunks are relatively fixed multi-word units. People memorize and retrieve them as a whole in order to reduce the burden of memory and fasten the speed of retrieval, which is beneficial to language output. In recent years, linguists have done many researches on lexical chunks from the perspectives of applied linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Michael Lewis (1992) and Nattinger & Decarrico (1993) also hold that lexical chunks should be used in language teaching and they propose concrete teaching methods.The present research is conducted to find out the developmental features of lexical chunks used in oral English for English majors. 102 students from Grade 1 to Grade 3 participated the experiment and the samples are collected by cross-sectional method. After recording oral statements of the students, the author analyze the relationship between lexical chunks and five temporal indices. The results indicate:(1) The increase of grade is not in proportion to the number of lexical chunks in oral output and the oral performance of the students. Grade 2 students use less lexical chunks in oral output, compared to Grade 1 students. There are differences in five temporal indices among three grades. The oral performance of the students is not a continuous process.(2) There are differences in the use of four types of lexical chunks. The students avoid use the institutionalized expressions as much as possible, but use most phrasal constraints.(3) The number of lexical chunks used in oral English can predict oral fluency. Phrasal constraints strongly predict oral fluency of students.The use of lexical chunks is very important to the development of oral English. The empirical study finds out the developmental features of English majors in oral English in order to give implications to teaching and raise the awareness of teachers and students on lexical chunks.