A Study Of Lexical Chunks' Function In Senior High School Students' Oral English Compositions

Lexical chunks have played a basic and significant role in oral English.Lexical chunks' function can reflect the usage of lexical chunks.In recent years,although many studies have investigated the characteristics of lexical chunks' function in many situations,there still exist some issues worth exploring and solving.Little research investigated both oral compositions of senior high school students and lexical chunks' function.Therefore,to help enhance the production of students' oral English,the research on lexical chunks' function in oral English compositions of senior high school students is worthy of in-depth discussion.Based on a self-built corpus around 27,178 words(The Corpus of Senior High School Students' Oral English Compositions,CSHSs OEC)and functional framework of lexical chunks put forward by distinguished linguist Douglas Biber,this study is aimed to explore the overall feature of lexical chunks' function and similarities and differences across composition type and students' oral proficiency level.The corpus covers 106 Senior Two students of 308 oral English compositions from No.1 High School Affiliated to Tongji University.Then,by means of Ant Conc 3.5.7.0(2019)and Log-likelihood Ratio,statistical results have been demonstrated in qualitative analysis to find out both similarities and differences in frequency and the usage of lexical chunks' function.The research has found that there are 2,480 occurrences of lexical chunks' function with 91.25 function items per thousand words in CSHSs OEC.Stance chunks(37.78,41.41%)is more than discourse organizers(26.65,29.20%)and referential expressions(25.42,27.86%)while special conversational chunks(1.40,1.53%)is the least with epistemic(17.11,18.75%)as the most frequently-used category,followed by identification/focusing,ability,place/time/text-deictic,topic elaboration,obligatory/directive,framing chunks,quantifying,topic introduction,simply inquiry,inferential,politeness routines and reporting clauses.In addition,it is also found that there indeed exist similarities and differences across composition type and students' oral proficiency level.Among three types of compositions(narration,argumentation and exposition),politeness routines and reporting clauses are in less frequent usage while the usage of obligatory/directive,epistemic,ability and identification/focusing exist significant differences.What's more,there is a significant difference between grade A students(top students)and grade C students(poor students)in the function of lexical chunks,especially the usage of functions of specific lexical chunks are significantly different.In conclusion,this research has primarily explored the overall distribution of lexical chunks' function in senior high school students' oral English compositions and the similarities and differences across composition type and students' oral proficiency level with the purpose of arousing senior high school students' wider concern with lexical chunks' function in oral English compositions and bringing some advantageous implications to students' oral English.