A Study On The Correlation Between Prosody Of Formulaic Chunks And L2 Learners’ Oral Fluency

As one of the most significant factors affecting L2 learners’ oral fluency, prosody is often overlooked(Wang Jun, 2013). On one hand, teachers are often hesitant to tackle prosody in class because it is perceived as complicated and elusive, which makes it difficult to be mastered. And textbooks about subject are scarce on the market. On the other hand, although L2 learners have never learned prosody systematically in class, their oral language is influenced frequently and subconsciously by their mother tongue in the process of actual language output, i.e. the melodies and rhythmical patters.The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between prosody of formulaic chunks and oral fluency of L2 learners. This thesis aims to solve the following two questions: 1) What is the relationship between prosody of formulaic chunks and L2 learners’ oral fluency? And it that significant? 2) Which aspects of oral fluency are the most remarkable ones and which ones are irrelevant? The sample consisted of 30 L2 learners from University of Social Science and Humanities in Warsaw for Erasmus Exchange Program, who were randomly selected from the second year of their post-graduates. Among then, there are 17 females and 13 males, aged between 25 and 26. The subjects were asked to deliver a short speech about their feelings studying in Poland for two to three minutes and all of their utterances were recorded with a MP3 player and then transcribed with the help of a software named Cool Edit Pro 2.1 to rate their oral fluency. Altogether, there are 10 different variables to measure L2 learners’ oral fluency in this study,and they can be divided into three categories: temporal variables, linguistic variables and performance variables. Besides, the author adopted Lewis’ classification of formulaic chunks, namely, ployword,collocation, verbal phrase, sentence frames and heads. With regard to prosody, a formula(Grabe, 2002)was used to measure its value from the perspective of stress, intonation, prosodic phrasing and timing.Finally, the overall correlation between prosody of formulaic chunks and L2 learners’ oral fluency was calculated using SPSS 17.0 for further Pearson.The result shows that prosodic properties, such as intonation, play an indispensable role in L2 learners’ oral fluency of different fluent non-native speakers and disfluent non-native speakers. And the author confirms its great contribution to evaluate the language fluency by examining two models of oral production. As a consequence, it can be safely demonstrated that there is a positive correlation betweenprosody of formulaic chunks and oral fluency. That is, with the improvement of L2 learners’ oral fluency,the prosody shows better properties.Based on the major findings of the study, some suggestions are offered as a reference for teachers to use prosodic teaching as an additional tool in the classroom to enhance L2 learners’ oral fluency.