A Longitudinal Study Of Oral English Lexical Chunks By Graduates Of Science And Engineering

Since the term "chunking" has been brought into the linguistic research field in1970s’, lexical chunk has achieved much attention of linguists. There already exist a great number of theoretical and empirical findings in this field. Nevertheless, it is not until the end of20th century that Chinese researchers began to contemplate the use of lexical chunks. An overwhelming consensus among linguists is that the use of lexical chunks could improve the oral proficiency, despite that there has been no general agreement on the definition and classification of lexical chunk so far. And the lexical chunk applying teaching approach has been widely accepted by teachers.Although there has been an increasing interest in study of lexical chunk, researchers prefer to choose college students or English major graduates as research subjects. It’s a pity that a weakness has existed in study of use of lexical chunks by graduates of science and engineering in a longitudinal view. Science graduates, with a unique ways of thinking and study habits, belong to a huge community which should be attached importance.Based on the definition proposed by Ma (2011) and the classification according to numbers of composition words, the study attempts to investigate the use of lexical chunks in oral production by science graduates. The present study randomly selects32graduates majoring in civil engineering, water conservancy and HVAC (heating ventilation air conditioning) in a211key university. The purpose of this study is to explore the overall characteristics and developmental features of lexical chunks use in their4-people discussion link during the2010-2011academic year.The study tries to answer the following questions:(1) From the cross-sectional view, what are the general characteristics of lexical chunks use? What are the usage characteristics of different categories of lexical chunk? What are the underlying reasons for those phenomena?(2) From the vertical view, is there any developmental change in the use of lexical chunks in terms of frequency, accuracy and variation during one academic year?Five researchers take part in recording, text transcript work and interview. With the help of SPSS, the results are as follows:(1) In the cross-sectional study aspect, the3-word chunk occupies the largest proportion of all types of chunks. Besides, graduates tend to overuse the "I perspective" chunks and underuse the "vagueness tags-type" lexical chunks. What’s more, graduates make more article mistakes and negative transfer of native language mistakes than other types of mistakes.(2) There is no obvious developmental change in accuracy and variation, and frequency of lexical chunks use declines in non-linearity during the one year.The results of interview reveal that graduates majoring in science and engineering lack of passion of learning and using lexical chunks in real communication because of their English learning strategies and memorial habits.This empirical research has illuminated useful details about the characteristics and developmental changes in the oral English lexical chunks by graduates of science and engineering. The findings are expected to give some hints on follow-up studies. It must be admitted that the present study has some points to be improved, for instance, the relatively small scale of samples and the limitation of interview questions. At the end of the preset study, the author would like to propose several suggestions for teaching oral English to graduates of science and engineering in classroom.