An Empirical Study On The Influencing Factors Of English Block Recognition In High School Students

This study adopts empirical approach, aiming to test if the types of language chunks and the difficulty degree of materials influence high school students' identification of chunks. According to the testified influential factors, the author provides some advice for the teachers who implement lexical chunks method. There are many researches on English language chunks broad and home, among which researches on the influence factors of chunk identification accounts for certain proportion. However, the research subjects are almost college students, and the research point is the influence of chunk types or students' English level. Therefore, this study is innovative in research subjects and points.The subjects are 52 juniors of the First High School in Huimin, Shandong province, whose test scores are about average for the grade. The materials are two test papers with different difficulty level, whose short essays are chosen from the listening and reading parts of the academic proficiency test papers and the college entrance examination papers. They are marked as Test One and Test Two. Students are required to underline the language points on the paper,including phrases, collocations, expressions and sentence structures. Forty papers are collected in Test One, and forty-three papers are collected in Test Two. Referring to Lewis' classification criteria, the author classifies the identified language chunks, and counts the number of various language chunks. Lewis classified the language chunks as poly-words, collocations, expressions and sentence structures. After collected the statistics, the author adopts a one-way analysis and a Post Hoc test for the number of different types of identified chunks, an Independent-Sample T test for the number of the identified chunks in different level of materials.The results show that:(1) four types of language chunks are identified. They are poly-words,collocations, expressions and sentence structures, among which the number of the identified poly-words is the biggest, while the number of the others is comparatively small. That's to say,students tend to take the poly-words which function as a word as a whole, and take the others as combinations of single words.(2) The type of language chunks is one of the factors that influence students' identification. In Test One and Test Two, the types of language chunks influence students' identification.(3) The difficulty degree of materials is one of the factors that influence students' identification. There is a significant difference in the total numbers of the identified chunks in different materials. It shows that the difficulty degree of materials also influences the identification.This study discusses the influences of the type of chunks and the difficulty of materials on chunks identification. Therefore, it is innovative in the research perspective and subjects. Itenriches the empirical studies on influential factors of the identification of language chunks. At the same time, it provides some advice for the lexical chunks teaching. When teaching language chunks, teachers should classify the chunks as poly-words, collocations, expressions and sentence structures, and predict and infer the difficulty of materials according to the student level and teaching experience. Teachers should adopt varieties of ways, such as filling in the dialogue,translation exercise, make up a story to train students to recognize different types of chunks in materials with different difficulty level, so that students can be more sensible to language chunks, and be habituated to notice, imitate, and use language chunks. This study also has limitations, for example, the small amount of sample may not reflect the whole sample thoroughly. In order to obtain accurate, reliable and comprehensible results, a further study with large-scale sample is needed.