Effects Of Frequency On Incidental Chunk Acquisition Of Senior One English Learners Through Reading-to-write Tasks

With the widely acknowledgement of nativism and queries on behaviorism in linguistics,“frequency” has not been paid enough attention in the past decades.However,because of the rapid development of computer science and corpus-based language learning,“frequency” arouses more interest of linguistic researchers.A variety of research prove that “frequency” plays a crucial role in learning a language.Furthermore,in the communication-focused language learning,learning experiences contribute to the construction of language,while “frequency” is of great importance in language construction.As far as the subjects in this study are concerned,the primary obstacles in achieving proficiency and fluency in English expressions are the lack of authentic English input and the absence of target language contexts of which chunks make up a large proportion.Therefore,the acquisition of chunks is of great significance in developing English proficiency and expressing oneself in more “authentic” English.The research aims to investigate the effect of “type frequency” on “incidental chunk acquisition” among senior one English learners.Through a teaching experiment,the author attempts to find answers to the research questions:(1)What are senior one school students' and teachers' perceptions of “frequency” and “chunk incidental acquisition” in English classes?(2)What model of frequency-based chunk instruction may be a suitable model in senior one English classes?(3)How does “frequency” affect “incidental chunk acquisition” through reading-to-write tasks?The research instruments include questionnaires respectively for students and English teachers,reading-to-write tasks and the think-aloud experiments.Firstly,the questionnaires for students and teachers are used to examine their perceptions of “frequency” and “chunk incidental acquisition”,with the aim of answering research question one.Secondly,chunk instruction in the research is done through reading-towrite tasks.Subjects get the treatment of “type frequency” in the five rounds of tasks covering five different topics respectively.The experiment results are collected and analyzed from perspectives of “quantity” and “quality” of target chunks so as to seek certain explanations for the second and the third research question.After the readingto-write tasks are finished in each round,in EC one high-chunk-achiever and one low-chunk-achiever are chosen to participate in the think-aloud experiment.It is conducted to provide more qualitative evidence to support the reading-to-write tasks.The reading-to-write tasks are designed in the following way.Five topics are matched with five rounds of tasks respectively.Each round of tasks is made up of “a task-pretest”,“tasks with different frequency in EC and CC” and “a task-delayed test”.As a main part of the research,the tasks,including reading materials and writing tasks,is an input-based study on incidental chunk acquisition.To guarantee research reliability and validity,firstly the reading materials containing the target chunks are carefully chosen.And in the reading-to-write tasks,the same target chunks concerning one topic are presented in different contexts(“type frequency”).Secondly,students' writing is graded by two raters with the criteria in National Matriculation English Test(hereinafter referred to as NMET)as the rubrics,and the raters both had the experience of grading NMET compositions.The average scores are used as the final scores of compositions.Thirdly,two raters analyze the target chunks from the perspectives of the amounts(quantity)and the accuracy of target chunks(quality)adopted in writing.The data is analyzed with SPSS 22.0.Research conclusions are listed as follows:1.“Task repetition” is less likely to be used in the incidental chunk acquisition by both the students and the teachers in this research.But they both achieve agreement on the importance of chunks in English learning and the need of efficient incidental chunk acquisition strategies in English learning.2.The teaching model proposed in the study is proved effective as a chunk instruction method.In the model,reading and writing are combined in an input-output cycle and it is practical and effective.3.“Type frequency” results in significant improvement in subjects' incidental chunk acquisition.Besides,“institutional expressions” and “sentence builders” are better acquired than “polywords” and “phrase constraints”.It is further confirmed that subjects give best performance when the task is repeated three times.