A Study Of The Relationship Between Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of Lexical Chunks And Their Oral Production In TEM-4

In recent years, with the further study of vocabulary, lexical chunks(LCs) have aroused more and more scholars’ attention. LC is a combination of no less than two words which are stored and extracted as a whole, complete in structure and coherent in meaning. The use of LCs has long been regarded as closely related with oral production from the point of many experts and scholars, but there has been little relevant research under test environment.This thesis intends to investigate the relationship between the use of LCs and the oral production of English majors under test environment. Put in another way, it is intended to study the relationship between the frequency of LCs and students’ oral performance, to be more precise, the relationship between the frequency of LCs and the three variables of oral performance in general, namely fluency, accuracy, and grammatical complexity. At the same time, this thesis also tries to see differences in Chinese EFL learners’ use of LCs of different types. Meanwhile, in order to tell the differences among students of different proficiency levels, this thesis divides the subjects into high achievers and low achievers according to the scores they achieved in the test. To answer the proposed questions, the writer carries out a quantitative and qualitative study with 60 English majors of Soochow University. All the collected data were processed with the help of SPSS 23.0.The findings of the study show that the frequency of LCs is closely related with students’ oral performance, that is, the more use of lexical chunks, the more excellent their oral performance is. Among the 3 types of LCs, ideational chunks(IC1s) take the largest proportion, textual chunks(TCs) rank the second, and interpersonal chunks(ICs) are the least used. In addition, only IC1 s show significant differences between high achievers and low achievers. What’s more, of the two groups, high achievers perform better than low achievers in terms of frequency and variety, but not accuracy of LCs.Research findings of this study are expected to shed some light on EFL learners’ oral English learning and lexical chunk teaching as well as corresponding research with lexical chunks.