An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Phonemic Repetition On Middle High School Students’ Retention Of Lexical Chunks

Numerous studies at home and abroad have shown that the storage of lexical chunks is positively related to the language proficiency of learners(including L1 learners and L2learners).Therefore,the storage of lexical chunks becomes particularly important.Researchers have conducted numerous researches on the learning strategies of lexical chunks.Among them,how to let students use strategies to memorize lexical chunks is the focus of the researchers.They found that chunks with the same sound patterns(alliteration and rhyme)were easier to be noticed.Some researchers at home and abroad have also proved that lexical chunks with phonological features(alliteration and rhyme)indeed facilitate seniors’ memory of lexical chunks.In order to explore the effect of phonemic repetition on the chunk memory of junior high school students,this study formulated the following research questions:1).For middle school students,do lexical chunks with phonemic repetition yield better mnemonic effects than those showing no repetitive sound patterns?2).In word repetition,perfect rhyme,alliteration,and assonance,which one has the strongest mnemonic effect in an immediate writing production test while which one shows the weakest effect?3).In word repetition,perfect rhyme,alliteration,and assonance which one has the strongest mnemonic effect in a delayed recognition test while which one shows the weakest effect?Participants in this experiment were 53 students from an ordinary rural junior high school in Lixian County,Hunan Province.The experiment was conducted in the multimedia classroom of the school.The experimental material involved is mainly a ppt containing 34 target words,in which a recording file with 34 chunks is inserted.The paper material contains a phrase list of 34 target words,and 32 chunks added as distractions in the delayed test.The findings turned out that 1)phonemic repetition and non-phonemic repetition have different effects on the memorization of target chunks.To be more specific,phonemic-repetition has better mnemonic effect on memorization and retention of the target chunks.2)Of the four repetitions,in the immediate test,word repetition elaborates the strongest effect,then are the alliteration and perfect rhyme,and assonance shows the weakest effect.3)In the delayed test,chunks with word repetition yield the best result,while assonance yields the worst result,however,chunks with perfect rhyme surpass multi-wordunits with alliteration.The present study provides certain enlightenment of lexical chunks in the process of teaching and learning of middle school students.Teachers can guide students to pay attention to this language feature of phoneme repetition;Students can also use the learning mnemonic method to promote autonomous learning.