A Contrastive Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In Spoken English Of Chinese Learners

Lexical chunks win their role in all kinds of communications due to theirconvenience for storage and extraction. The present study, based on the data drawnfrom SECCL2.0, attempts to carry out a contrastive analysis of lexical chunks used byboth Chinese EFL learners of higher and lower proficiency in their TEM8oral testfrom four aspects: the characteristics of lexical chunks, the density of lexical chunks,the richness of lexical chunks, and typical errors of lexical chunks.Through the text material collection as well as the mathematical statistic analysisby using the tools of Antconc3.2.1and SPSS17.0, the main finds are concluded as thefollowing:(1) There are differences in frequency of the four types of lexical chunks in bothHPSECT2007and LPSECT2007and the frequency orders of different lexical chunksin both corpora are the same. Chinese EFL learners prefer using phrasal constraintsand polywords in oral test, but using relatively fewer sentence builders andinstitutionalized expressions. Learners of higher proficiency make use of more lexicalchunks than learners of lower proficiency.(2) The density degrees of polywords, phrasal constraints and sentence buildersused by higher proficient learners are higher than that of lower proficient learners.Only polywords density degrees of the two corpora show a significant difference.(3) The richness degrees of polywords and phrasal constraints used by higherproficient learners are higher than that of lower proficient learners, while the richnessdegree of sentence builders used by higher proficient learners is lower than that oflower proficient learners. Only polywords density degrees of the two corpora show asignificant difference.(4) There are some common typical errors of lexical chunks in these learners’ oralEnglish, such as intra-lingual errors, redundancy errors, confusion errors and so on.