Senior Phase Of Chinese Learners' Spoken Language Output Investigation And Analysis Of The Situation

Chunking theories have become one of major theoretical perspectives in language education field since the beginning of1980s. In the field of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL), most studies on Chinese language chunks focus on the categorization, functions and application values in language teaching. While most research mentioned that the use of lexical chunks plays an essential role in improving learner’s output ability, few empirical studies have been done on the description and analysis of language chunks in Chinese language learners’oral output. With this background, this dissertation tries to describe and analyze the chunks in the intermediate and advanced level learners’oral output using methods of language corpse analysis, face-to-face interviews and contrastive analysis and compare them with native Chinese speakers.Based on the empirical study, the Chinese language learners tend to use easy chunks with a lower frequency and smaller inventories of language chunks compared with native Chinese speakers. And learners are more familiar with institutionalized expressions, phrasal structures and high frequency collocations than the idioms. Regarding the errors when using language chunks, this dissertation put them into three categories:misused chucks, self-made chunks and ill-constructed chunks and identify that inappropriate input, negative transfer of the native language, overgeneralization, emotional barrier and lack of feedbacks are five major reasons behind those errors.The dissertation includes five Chapters:Chapter one is an introduction to the writing motivation, the significance of the research, the writing goals and the method used.Chapter two is a brief retrospect of the historical development of language chunking theories and the related studies on Chinese language chunks.Chapter three is an explore of the language chunks in second language acquisition and the definition, classifications and functions.Chapter four is an empirical study including the design, the subjects, the operation and key results.Chapter five is the conclusion including key findings, the application value of the results in TCSL and the shortcomings of this dissertation.The study sheds light on the language chunks in the Chinese language learners’ oral output and can be good references for adjusting language teaching methods and improving the efficiency of language acquisition.