| Lexical chunks are stored as a whole unit in brain, which can be wholly or slightly changed to be employed by learners as prefabricated chunks. They play a very important role in second language acquisition. However, there are thousands of lexical chunks and it is impossible to teach all the chunks in the English class. How to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning lexical chunks has been a hot topic for researchers. In the past two decades, the study of second language acquisition has seen a number of important theories:including input theory, output hypothesis, incidental vocabulary acquisition and so on. Based on these theories, this thesis aims to test the effects of output and input tasks on Chinese's senior high school students' acquisition of lexical chunks.This research aims to answer the following questions:(1) Do the input-based task and output-based task have different influences on the acquisition of form and meaning of the lexical chunks?(2) Do the input-based task and output-based task have different influences on the use of the lexical chunks?(3) Do learners'English achievement affect the acquisition of the lexical chunks?This was an experimental study. The following results and findings were obtained after the data analysis and discussion:1) Both of the two tasks could facilitate the acquisition of the target chunks'form and meaning. The input group over-performed the output group in terms of the acquisition of the target chunks'form and meaning with significant differences. 2) No difference was found in effect of the two task types on the use of the target chunks. 3) For students of low-score group, the input task over-performed the output task in terms of the acquisition of the target chunks. However, no significant difference was found for the students of higher-score group. The results of the study shed some light on language teaching practice, especially the teaching and learning of lexical chunks. |
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