The Empirical Study On The Correlation Between Lexical Chunks And College Students’ Oral Fluency

Oral English has received considerable attention in foreign language teachingand recruitment. Oral fluency is also regarded as one of the essential requirements ofthe ability for foreign language communication. There are a majority of factors thatinfluence oral fluency. In recent years, more and more researchers at home and abroadhave come to the common ground that lexical chunks play a positive role in languageacquisition and oral production. Based on lexical chunks, the author carries on anempirical research on the correlation between lexical chunks and oral fluency ofcollege non-English majors.A follow-up survey is conducted in the present study. The researcher collects 120samples of impromptu topics twice from the sophomores of Shandong University ofPolitical Science and Law, and the sampling period lasts a semester to investigate thecorrelation between the use of lexical chunks and the development of oral Englishfluency. Data collected in the survey tries to answer the following three questions.(1) Are there any differences of oral fluency indexes between two tests? Is thereremarkable improvement on oral fluency?(2) Is there any noteworthy development on the number, diversity, average lengthand frequency of lexical chunks?(3) Is there any correlation between the application of lexical chunks and oralfluency?The author adopts a longitudinal method to incorporate lexical chunks intosecond language oral fluency. First, apply Cool Edit 2.1 to analyze the differences ofeight indexes of oral fluency in the pretest and posttest. Second, count out the numberof the lexical chunks in each sample, and calculate their average length, diversity andvariety. Third, a series of independent sample t-tests and paired sample t-tests are usedto analyze oral fluency indexes and the use of lexical chunks of the two tests by thehelp of SPSS17.0. Next, employ Multiple Regression method which analyzes severalindependent variables and dependent variables to further discuss the correlationbetween the use of lexical chunks and oral fluency development. Three major findings are stated as follows:(1) There are significant differences in terms of four fluency indexes, namely,speaking rate, phonation/time ratio, mean length of speech run and average length ofpause;(2) The number and frequency of chunks have significantly improved;(3) The number of lexical chunks is highly correlated to speaking rate,phonation/time ratio, mean length of speech run, average length of pause and speechaccuracy; the frequency of lexical chunks is negatively correlated to the ratio ofpruned length to total length; no correlation is found between the use of lexicalchunks and speech complexity.The study reveals the trend of the development of L2 oral fluency for Chinesenon-English majors in the classroom setting, and the evidence proves that the teachingof lexical chunks facilitates L2 oral fluency significantly. It is an attempt to explorelinguistic features of oral fluency. It opens up the possibility of altering presentCollege English teaching and provides reference for further teaching and study.