Corpus-based Contrastive Studies Of Spoken Lexical Chunks Between Chinese English Learners And Native English Speakers

Many Chinese students start learning English at a very young age.Yet they still cannot achieve the level as native speakers do.The difference in spoken lexical chunks is one of the main problems of this gap.Lexical chunk as a form-function pairing has greater pragmatic significance than a single word,thus being more advantageous in promoting the fluency and accuracy of language production.Lexical chunks also occupy a significant proportion in both vernacular language and written language.Therefore,it is advocated that lexical chunk should be considered as the basic unit in language teaching.This research aims at answering two questions:1)What are the differences in spoken lexical chunks between Chinese English learners and native English speakers?2)What can we infer from the research findings and how to apply them in language learning and teaching?The research adopts the corpus-based approach,which mainly based on the two corpora,ANC(American Nation Corpus)and SECCL2.0(Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners).Antconc is utilized to extract data.First,2-word to 7-word lexical chunks were extracted from ANC and SECCL2.0 respectively.Second,manually filtered those ungrammatical and repeated ones.Latter,the refined data were compared and analyzed.Last,the results are discussed in the applied usage.The research findings indicate that:1)Chinese learners do have an inadequacy in spoken lexical chunks,both functional lexical chunks and non-functional lexical chunks.2)Chinese learners'spoken lexical chunks are far less than native English speakers in frequency,complexity,and variety.In the study of English oral retelling and conversations,the ability to use lexical chunks has a significant correlation with oral performance.The knowledge of lexical chunks is closely related to the level of spoken language ability.In other words,proper use of lexical chunks can improve the fluency of communication and idiomatically of word choice,the ability of lexical chunks is closely related to the level of English speaking and writing.This research further proves the previous studies and uses statistics to analyze the differences,which can also give some inspirations to latter studies.Therefore,according to the research findings and previous studies,we could imply that memorize lexical chunks of native speakers' intentionally and apply them in spoken language could improve second language learners' language fluency and idiomaticity.In other words,lexical chunks can help language learners achieve higher levels in their spoken language.