A Study On Relationships Between Non-English Major’s Vocabulary Fluency Knowledge And Oral Production

With the transition from exam-oriented education to quality education,more and more researchers and educators have gradually realized the importance of oral English proficiency,and tried to explore the influence factors of oral English performance through a variety of empirical researches so as to more effectively improve the quality of second language oral English teaching and enhance EFL learners’ oral English ability.The researches on the influences of lexical factors have always been a hot topic in this field.With the deepening of research on the influences of vocabulary breadth and depth on oral output,more and more researchers found that these two dimensions can no longer meet current research needs.Therefore,vocabulary fluency,an indicator of the speed at which EFL learners can extract target words from memory,has been gradually introduced to enrich and perfect the researches on the influence of vocabulary on oral output."Fluency" is widely known in the field of second language acquisition,but "vocabulary fluency" has been neglected by researchers due to the complexity of its measurement.Vocabulary fluency is a speed indicator for L2 learners to retrieve target words from memory,which can effectively distinguish the difficulty of language users in acquiring and using the words they know.Previous studies have shown that the ability to quickly extract vocabulary knowledge enables language users to reserve more attention resources for higher-level language processing tasks,which plays an important role in second language acquisition,and therefore,deserves more attention from researchers.The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between vocabulary fluency and oral output of second language learners,and answer to what extent vocabulary fluency can affect oral output and its three dimensions(complexity,accuracy and fluency).In this study,vocabulary fluency is measured through single verb fluency and phrasal verb fluency to explore whether there is a significant difference in their influence on oral output.At the same time,the present study used two different tasks,narrative task and argumentative task,to explore whether the impact of vocabulary fluency on oral English varies with different task types.In addition,three dimensions of spoken language(complexity,accuracy and fluency)were represented by eight more specific measures for objective measurement and scoring,including: mean length of T-units(MLTU),mean number of dependent clauses per T-unit(DCTU),frequency of tense form use(FTFU),rate of error-free T-unit(REFT),frequency of correct use of past tense(FCUPT),pruned speech rate(PSR),mean length of run(MFR)and number of repeats per minute(NRPM),to explore how vocabulary fluency affects oral output.At present,the test form of vocabulary fluency is still in the exploratory stage.This study adopted and optimized previous tests of vocabulary fluency.A total of 88non-English majors were invited to conduct two vocabulary fluency tests and two oral tests,and 140 valid oral English audio recordings were collected.The two oral tests were scored for three times in total: on-site subjective holistic scoring,off-site subjective analytical scoring,and off-site objective analytical scoring(after transcribed and annotated audio materials).The researcher used SPSS 26.0 to analyze the data of 140 oral materials and drew the following results and conclusions:Firstly,by analyzing the correlation between vocabulary fluency and onsite subjective holistic scoring,this study found that there is a significantly positive correlation between vocabulary fluency and oral performance,namely,English learners with stronger vocabulary fluency tend to perform better on oral tasks.At the same time,there is no significant difference between single verb fluency and phrasal verb fluency for the same oral task.Secondly,by analyzing the correlation between vocabulary fluency and onsite subjective holistic scoring and off-site subjective analytical scoring,this study found that the impact of vocabulary fluency knowledge on oral performance of second language learners was affected by task type to some extent.Both single verb fluency and phrasal verb fluency are strongly correlated with the performance on the oral narrative task,but weakly correlated with the performance on the argumentative task.Thirdly,through the regression analysis of vocabulary fluency and onsite subjective holistic scoring,this study found that single verb fluency can effectively predict the performance of both narrative and argumentative oral tasks,and phrasal verb fluency can only work as a reliable predictor of oral narrative tasks,but fail to effectively predict L2 users’ argumentative performance.However,the regression analysis of vocabulary fluency and off-site subjective analytical scoring found that phrasal verb fluency can effectively predict the accuracy of argumentative task,but cannot predict its complexity and fluency.Phrasal verb fluency is therefore considered as an unreliable predictor of argumentative tasks.Fourthly,by analyzing the correlation between vocabulary fluency and off-site objective analytical scoring,it is found that single verb fluency and phrasal verb fluency were positively correlated with frequency of correct use of past tense(FCUPT)and mean length of run(MLR),and the correlation between vocabulary fluency and MLR was stronger.There was also a positive correlation between single verb fluency and frequency of tense form use(FTFU).However,there is no correlation between vocabulary fluency and the other five dimensions.For the first time,this study took vocabulary fluency as research object to explore its relationships with oral English,which contributed to the study of vocabulary knowledge as well as to that of oral English.It enriched the empirical study on the vocabulary fluency of Chinese English learners and the exploration of the influencing factors of English competence.