An Empirical Study On Correlation Between Lexical Chunk And Students’ Oral Production Competence

Lexical chunks are relatively fixed multi-word units with high frequency in language. As the combinations of forms and function, people usually memorize and retrieve them as whole in language output. Following the lexical view of language, Michael Lewis propose a new teaching approach: Lexical Approach. In the lexical approach, lexis in its various types is thought to play a central role in language teaching and learning. Lexical Approach has theoretically summarized that focus on lexical chunks in language teaching and learning is effective for learners’ language development.In this thesis, a one semester experiment on lexical approach teaching was conducted. Two parallel classes of62sophomore students from Beijing University of Agriculture participated in the study. The present empirical study was designed to test whether lexical approach can facilitate the students’ oral English development, aiming at exploring the following questions:1) The relationship between lexical chunks and students’ oral production competence;2) The distribution of different types of chunks in students’ spoken language production;3) The distribution of different functions of chunks in students’ spoken language production. In addition, errors of chunk using existing in spoken language production were discussed in detail.The author respectively adopted traditional teaching and lexical approach in control class and experiment class. The oral tests were conducted before and after the experiment to test the effect of the teaching experiment in form of monologue. Based on the analysis of the recording oral statements, the author comes to the following conclusions:1) Lexical approach has a positive effect on students’ quality of oral production.2) As for the distribution of four types of lexical chunks, phrasal constraints are the most frequently used type followed by sentence builders, and then poly-words, institutionalized expressions are the least used. In addition, based on the comparison of chunk variation, experiment class make progress in all types of lexica chunks using except phrasal constraints.3) As for different functions of lexical chunks, discourse devices accounted for the largest part among the three functions of lexical chunks, However, there were no chunks of necessary topics in oral productions.4) There were three kinds of errors in students’ oral productions:mother tongue negative transfer, overuse of some chunks, misuse of functional word.Finally, the author learn students’ attitudes and difficulties by a questionnaire, and gives some pedagogical suggestions:teacher should provide enough comprehensible and authentic lexical chunks input; guarantee enough opportunities to oral output; cultivate students’ autonomous learning enthusiasm.