Analysis Of Lexical Chunks In English News Broadcasts

Listening to news broadcasts has become an efficient way to get informationabout the world and learn a language. English news broadcasts have becomeincreasingly popular in recent years. Journal Language has rules of its own. Listenersneed to be familiar with these features to make full use of English news broadcasts.The importance of lexical chunks in language acquisition and application hasattracted a lot of attention over the past ten years. Nattinger and DeCarrico (2000)classify lexical chunks into four structural categories, i.e. sentence builders, phrasalconstraints, polywords and institutionalized expressions. This thesis studied the use ofthese four types of lexical chunks in different topics of English news broadcasts.The following questions were addressed:1. What is the distribution frequency of lexical chunks in different topics,regardless of lexical chunk categories? Are the differences significant?2. Are there any differences in the use of lexical chunks of the same structuralcategory among different topics? Are the differences significant?Altogether150news items were selected from the VOA (Voice ofAmerica), with30items from each of the following topics, namely, politics,technology, health, education and economics The number of words in the itemswas strictly controlled, with about400-500words in each item.The findings are as follows:(1) there is no significant difference among thegeneral distribution of lexical chunks in the five news topics, if do not considercategories of lexical chunks; and (2) as for each lexical chunk category, some haveand some do not have differences in their distribution among topics, that is, thenumber of phrasal constraints in political news items is a little greater than those inthe other topics, however, the numbers of sentence builders are similar in the fourtopics, so do polywords and institutionalized expressions. It needs to mention thatinstitutionalized expressions are extremely few.Some suggestions were given to both English teachers and second language learners. Teachers can introduce Nattinger and DeCarrico’s theory to students,exemplified by particular examples. They should present numerous news broadcastsmaterials to students, and let students do plenty of listening exercises regularly. Onthe other hand, learners should be aware of lexical chunks when reading or listeningto English news.