A Study Of The Effect Of The Development Of Lexical Bundle On Fluent Production Of Lower Proficient Speakers

The oral fluency of foreign language is an important part of the foreign language proficiency, a major goal of foreign language teaching, and also a significant sign for testing the success of foreign language learning. However, due to the multitudes of factors that influence oral fluency, for many years, quite a few researchers have committed themselves to studying the methods that would enhance students’oral fluency from different points of view, such as watching foreign movies, drilling repeatedly and applying lexical bundle in foreign language teaching. Among these methods, most scholars admit that the application of lexical bundles in teaching is an effective way to improve students’oral production. Meanwhile, linguists have come up with quite a few theories for lexical bundle study, which lay the solid foundation for further study. Under the influence of foreign studies, scholars in our countries also do a great deal of research about adopting lexical bundle in foreign language teaching, and make achievements in some degree. Nevertheless, studies of lexical bundle in lower proficient students are scarce. Therefore, on the basis of Levelt’s Model of Speech Production, Anderson’s ACT model, Krashen’s Theory of Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis, the effect of the development of lexical bundle on fluent production of lower proficient speakers is to be studied in this study.Subjects’oral fluency is tested according to the "Extemporaneous Speech"(no time is given to prepare before the test in this study), and then the scores of pre-test and post-test are analyzed separately. Before the experiment starts, all the students are divided into two groups (the higher proficient group and lower proficient group) by taking an examination. Then15students are chose from each group of lower proficient students at random as the subjects of this experiment, who are divided into experimental class and control class. The experiment lasts16weeks. Students are tested before and after the experiment along with each oral production is recorded, which is transcribed later, because the number of lexical bundles is needed to analyze. As the limitations of the condition of experiment and the complexity of oral fluency, only the temporal variables of oral fluency are measured by using Adobe Audition3.0. At the same time, the number of lexical bundles of each transcript is counted. Finally, all the data collected is calculated by SPSS16.0.The results show that students in experimental class are much better than students in control class. It can say that the development of lexical bundle could indeed enhance lower proficient speakers’oral production. There is significant difference in speaking rate, phonation/time ratio and average length of pause, while no significant difference in the aspects of articulation rate and mean length of runs, but there are still slightly improved to a certain degree. The number of lexical bundle of students in experimental class becomes larger in the end of the experiment, that is to say, the quantity of input of lexical bundle has close relationship with the output of oral fluency.In this study, it has proved that the development of lexical bundle absolutely played an important part in the process of the improvement of fluent production of lower proficient speakers. However, it is just the preliminary exploration of teaching students’oral fluency. Meanwhile, it can also be noticed that during the learning process, subjects in the experimental class also make progress in listening, writing and other learning aspects, which could indicate that lexical bundle plays a crucial role in foreign language learning.