A Study On High-frequency Words In College Students’ English Speeches

In the domain of lexis, high-frequency words often distribute over a wide range of spoken English, thus they are generally seen to be the most basic and simple words and of critical importance in second language learning. As a guiding teacher for the contestants who go in for the English speech contests, the author tends to base on the early researches about word frequency, and to investigate high-frequency words in college students’English speech contests, including description of former related researches, study of the distribution and characteristics of high-frequency words, comparisons with Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), College Learners’Spoken English Corpus(COLSEC), and Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), possible reasons for the subtle differences as well. There are some characteristics for the high-frequency words:First, they are mainly made up of function words, such as pronouns, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, fillers, etc. Secondly, lexical chunks are used to carry more information than signal words. They are used for smooth interaction, to summarize, or to introduce one’s own viewpoint. Frequency lists for everyday spoken language differ significantly from those dependent only on written database. And some examples of frequency list can show the difference of texts of different styles or in different fields. Meanwhile, as a small-sample research, the present study just partly reflects using conditions of high-frequency words in China’s college students’English speech-contests. Some suggestions are made, such as teachers should emphasize the importance of high-frequency words and chunks, dictionaries and textbooks are good means for students to learn by heart, and speaking activities should be increased in class. Hopefully, this research can be helpful to Chinese English learners for their oral English and the skills in English speech contests.