The Effects Of Phonemic Repetitionon Senior High School Students' Memorization Of English Lexical Chunks

According to recent research,second language proficiency has positive correlation with the storage of lexical chunks,which means that memorization of lexical chunks is of great significance to second language learning.To make the memorization of lexical chunks easier,many researchers made a lot efforts to explore efficient mnemonic methods and it is found that some salient patterns of sound repetition such as rhyme and alliteration are particularly noticeable and memorable.However,there are other phonemic repetitive types covered in the scope of phonemic repetition except for alliteration and rhyme.Whether other phonemic repetitive types also have mnemonic effects on chunks?Whether different phonemic repetitive types possess equal mnemonic effects?If not,which type boast the strongest while which one would be the weakest?Whether senior high school students are able to make use of phonemic repetition to facilitate memorization of lexical chunks?To answer those questions and to further explorations on the mnemonic effects of phonemic repetition on lexical chunks,this study was undertaken to investigate the effects of phonemic repetition on Chinese senior high school students' memorization of English lexical chunks,two research questions are designed as follows:1)as for senior high school students in China,does lexical chunks with phonemic repetition have better mnemonic effects than their those lexical chunks showing little or no phonemic repetition?2)Of alliteration,half rhyme,assonance and word repetition these four types of phonemic repetition,which one boast the strongest mnemonic effects while which one owns the weakest effects?Participants in this study area class of 57 students at the third year of senior high school from Longhui second school,Hunan province.The experiment materials consist of a tape of recording and a sheet including 32 target phrases.In immediate test,tasks for participants including listening to the tape,sorting target phrases and dictation.Task in delayed test is relatively simple,participants were asked to recognize and tick out target phrases memorized from immediate test.Data of this experiment are collected by the researcher and are submitted to SPSS.21 for statistical analysis.Two findings yielded from the study are presented as follows.1)The effects of phonemic repetition and non-phonemic repetition on Chinese senior high school students' memorization of English lexical chunks are significantly different,phonemic repetition has better mnemonic effect on their memorization of lexical chunks,immediate as well as delayed.2)Four types of phonemic repetition own different mnemonic effect.Specifically,word repetition has the best mnemonic effect while half rhyme has the worst,the mnemonic effects of alliteration and assonance are in between with the mnemonic effects of the former stronger than that of the later.This study can offer some enlightenment to lexical chunks teaching and learning in senior high school.As for teachers,they are supposed to call students'attention to lexical chunks with phonemic repetition in teaching.As for students,they should be able to recognize phonemic repetition and consciously make use of the phonemic repetitive feature to facilitate their memorization and retention.