A Correlation Study On Lexical Chunks And Ielts Speaking Fluency

Oral fluency is an important indicator of English oral proficiency.How to improve students' oral fluency through effective teaching is also an urgent issue for teachers.Among the many factors affecting the English oral fluency,lexical chunk has gained great attention.Research at home and abroad has proved the positive impact of lexical chunk on oral fluency from the perspective of cognitive grammar,psychological linguistics and empirical research.However,the relevant research objects need to be further expanded.This study takes IELTS speaking learners as objects,conducting empirical research on the changes in their use of lexical chunks and oral fluency,thus further exploring the correlation between lexical chunks and oral fluency.In this study,20 high-school IELTS learners in the experimental group and 20 in the control group were given a 16-week teaching experiment respectively.Lexical approach was conducted in the experimental group and traditional teaching method was adopted in the control group.80 linguistic samples from pretest and posttest were collected.The changes in lexical chunk use were evaluated with frequency,accuracy and variation;the changes in oral fluency were evaluated with speaking rate,ratio of pruned syllables to total syllables and ratio of error-free T-units to total T-units.Independent sample T test was performed with SPSS 23.to investigate changes in lexical chunk use and in oral fluency of the two groups after the treatment;Qualitative analysis was done on the data of the high achievers and the low achievers to figure out if the effect of teaching lexical chunks varies by different levels;Pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression method were used to test possible correlation between lexical chunk use and oral fluency.The above analysis led to the following conclusions:(1)Teaching LC can effectively improve LC use.The frequency and accuracy of EG was significantly improved.The experimental group can use more lexical chunks with higher accuracy than the control group after the treatment.Both high achievers and low achievers improved frequency greatly,though high achievers benefit more from LC teaching.(2)In the posttest,the experimental group significantly accelerated the speech rate compared with the control group,and the ratio of pruned length to total length decreased significantly.The increase of the ratio of error-free T-unit to total T-unit was not obvious.Both high achievers and low achievers made improvements.(3)There is a certain correlation between lexical chunk use and oral fluency.There is a strong correlation between the frequency and variation of lexical chunk use and speaking rate.This study confirms that lexical chunk teaching can significantly improve the use of lexical chunks and improve oral fluency in the IELTS oral classroom teaching environment in a training school.It demonstrates the effectiveness of the method of improving oral fluency and provides an IELTS oral teaching model for reference.