An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Lexical Approach On Non-English Major's Oral Fluency

Oral fluency is consideredas an important index of the comprehensive language proficiency.Many researchers both from home and abroad have been exploring how to preferably improve oral fluency.In recent years,whether the use of lexical chunks can have a positive effect on the development of learners' oral fluency has attracted much attention of researchers.The present study using an empirical approach attempts to explore whether involving the lexical approach into Chinese non-English majors' oral English class can improve the learners' oral fluency.This study conducted a 17-week teaching experiment involved two parallel groups.The lexical approach was applied to the experimental group while the communicative approach was usedin the control group.The comparison was made in the oral fluency indexes on the post-test of these two groups.The changes of fluency indexes,lexical chunks use and the correlation between chunks use and oral fluency on the post-test were also explored.The results indicated that the experimental group subjects' temporal indexes of fluency were significantly above that of the subjects in the control group,and for the experimental group there was significant improvement in chunk proportion and frequency as well as the speaking rate,mean length of run and the phonation/time ratio,but the average length of pause reduced.In addition,positive correlation was found between speaking rate and chunk frequency and between average length of pause and chunk variety,while negative correlation came to light between phonation/time ratio and chunk variety.This study reveals the tendencies of the use of lexical chunks and the development of oral fluency for Chinese non-English majors in the chunk-based second language class setting and has implications for both lexical chunk research and second language oral teaching.