An Empirical Study On Corpus-Based Acquisition Of Prefabricated Chunks

In recent years, prefabricated chunks have become an important issue in the study of Applied Linguistics. Many theoretical and empirical studies have proved that students’ability to recognize and properly use prefabricated chunks significantly affects their foreign language proficiency. However, most studies on prefabricated chunks in recent years only emphasized on either theoretical excavation or correlation between usage of prefabricated chunks and students’ proficiency of listening, speaking, reading, writing, translation, respectively. In contrast, there are rare studies on telling learners how to acquire prefabricated chunks. Therefore, this study mainly focused on the acquisition of prefabricated chunks, which was measured from three aspects of identifying, using and memorizing in the research. A GDPPP (Guidance-Discovery-Presentation-Practice-Production) model was explored in this study to help language learners acquire prefabricated chunks. Besides, this study also discussed the effect of GPPP (Guidance-Presentation-Practice-Production) model with no access to corpus.The quantitative research and qualitative research were both adopted in this study. The author chose three sophomore classes from the College of Materials in Northeast Forestry University as Experimental Class1, Experimental Class2and Control Class. Firstly, a pre-test was given to test students’ability to identify and use prefabricated chunks. Secondly, a ten-week training with the GDPPP model and GPPP model was carried out respectively to the Experimental Class1and Experimental Class2. After the training, a post test was conducted to test its effect. One month later, a delayed test was carried out to test the subjects’ability to memorize prefabricated chunks and interviews were also conducted. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS19.0.The findings of this study proved that:1) students’ability to identify, use and memorize prefabricated chunks was improved significantly in the Experimental Class1and Experimental Class2after the training;2) the improvement of the Experimental Class2was not as significant as that of the Experimental Class1;3) compared with the traditional method, the corpus-based model brought more positive influence on students’habits of acquisition and autonomous learning. According to the above findings, the author proposed the following recommendations:1) Students should be properly exposed to the knowledge of prefabricated chunks;2) Students could be instructed to resort to the corpus for the acquisition of prefabricated chunks.