Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In recent years, how to develop language sense in teaching has been one of thehot topics. The scholars at home or abroad all believe that language sense exists inlanguage learning. About it, no one questions it. However, about the definition oflanguage sense, opinions on it vary from person to person.We attend to define language sense like that, language sense is not only one kindof feeling and but also one kind of recognition. And it is the direct reaction of theobjective world in the human brain. Through a summary and review of the previousresearch, we know that “language sense” is a non-native term. And it cannot bethought as an intuition and a simple feeling. Only through maintaining more exposureto the target language and reading can language sense be developed.After “chunking” was first proposed by Becker in 1975, chunks theory had beenreceiving increasing attention from linguists in the application of language teachingno matter from home or abroad. Lexical chunks integrate semantics, grammar andcontext together. Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) believed that this languagephenomenon is a multi-word lexical phenomenon, which exists in vocabulary andsyntax. Lexical chunks, used frequently, have many functions. Cognitivepsychologists have found that learners often use prefabricated "blocks" in the processof language learning, which are usually a series of linguistic structures that arememorized, processed, stored, and extracted by the individual as a whole.As the important and basic language ability in the second language learning,reading plays an important part in language inputting. Meanwhile, reading is of greatimportance to inspire their working potential in scientific research for students. As asignificant indicator of English proficiency, English reading comprehensioncompetence occupies a large proportion of kinds of English tests. English tests alwaysneed to be accomplished in limited time, so it’s difficult to read word by word to getall information during the reading process. Therefore, getting the crucial informationto understand the sentence or even discourse is the key point. As Lewis said, as acomposite of language form and function, Lexical chunk speed up the completion oflanguage utterances. Compared with the word and collocation in the traditional sense,lexical chunk has made a breakthrough, which contributes to discoursecomprehension abilities. As prefabricated, fixed or semi-fixed multi-word units,lexical chunks can be memorized and extracted as a whole without generation oranalysis by grammatical rules. Therefore, it can simplify language processing,accelerate language acquisition and facilitate language output.In spite of much attention has been paid and many types of research have beendone in language sense and lexical chunks respectively, but the related research on thecorrelation between the awareness of lexical chunk and reading comprehension abilityare rare. Therefore, it is essential to explore whether there is a relationship betweenthe lexical chunks and English learners’ reading comprehension ability.
.........
1.2 Research Significance
In the process of English learning, many students don’t know how to grasp themain idea and structure of the whole text while reading. When encounteringunfamiliar words, they will find it’s too difficult to continue. Or sometimes there isnot any new word in the whole text, but no matter how many times they read, theycannot understand what this text want to express, not to mention to get the meaning ofeach word and sentence. So they answer the related questions just by guessing. It canbe imagined that the results are not optimistic. Over time, they will lose confidence.This phenomenon will fall into a vicious circle. Their English proficiency will getworse and worse. As we all know, among kinds of English tests, English readingcomprehension accounts for a large of proportion, as well as its marks in whole paper.If the reading ability of English learners cannot be improved, their marks can getnowhere.Before this study, in the process of English teaching and learning, prefabricatedblocks have not received widespread attention from teachers and students. Inspired bycommunicative language teaching methods, teachers have shifted their attention fromgrammatical competence to communicative competence, but lexical chunks still donot enjoy its popularity. So most students don’t realize the role lexical chunk plays inEnglish learning.Meanwhile, we can feel that language sense more or less can be conducive toEnglish reading. For instance, sometimes in English test, we will get the right answerfor some questions easily, but we cannot clarify why we should choose it. Thissituation is involved with “language sense”. Language sense, that is, to sense thelanguage. Here, “language” means”target language”. Language phenomenon is a largeconcept, and Lexical chunk is one component of it. Thus, this thesis will mainly focus language sense on the lexical chunks.In spite of many research have been done on the lexical chunks, empiricalresearch did not give much insight into relationship between the identification oflexical chunks and reading ability. So this study tries to explore the correlationbetween English majors’ identification of lexical chunks and their reading ability,which aims to offer enlightenment and pedagogical advice for both teachers andlearners.
.........
Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Research on Language Sense
In China, Xia Mianzun (1924) is the first scholar to put forward this concept. Hedefines it as the people’s awareness of “characters”. Since these researchers such asXia Mianzun(1924),Ye Shentao (1980) and lv Shuxiang (1984) initiate languageteaching on the basis of language sense, the concept of “language sense ”is graduallybeing understood and accepted. However, about the definition of language sense,opinions differ from person to person. Nearly each scholar, who does research onlanguage sense, has his understanding of language sense from different angle, as wellas its definition.Several main definitions are as follows:1. Language sense is the awareness of written words for each person.(XiaMianzun, 1924)2. Ye Shengtao thought that people had a sensitivity to language or writtenwords because of their understanding.” (Ye Shengtao, 1980)3. Language sense contains the awareness of semantic, grammar and phonetic.Lv Shuxiang (1984) made a summary of the definition, classification of languagesense from the perspective of the surface structure. (Lv Shuxiang, 1984)4. Language sense is one feeling to words in text or discourse. In a broader angle,it includes all feelings to words in the audio-visual sense. In a narrow-angle, it refersto the feeling to written language in reading. (Li Shanlin, 1990)From the above language sense’s definitions, we can conclude that differentscholars have their own viewpoints,but the key point of their argument focus on itscharacteristic--“language sensitivity”. Some believed that it can be understood as“sense” or “perception”, and some thought it can be directly regarded as “intuition”.
.........
2.2 Previous Research on Lexical Chunks
How to define and classify lexical chunks is the most fundamental problem inthis field, but until now there still exists controversy. In the past years,there are at least40 terminologies to denote “lexical chunk”, such as, lexicalized items (Pawley &Syder, 1983), formulaic speech (Bolander, 1989), lexical phrases (Nattinger &DeCarrico, 1992), lexical chunks (Lewis 1993) and prefabricated or ready-madelanguage (Howarth, 1998), lexicalizations (Moon, 1998) etc. Due to different researchangles and purposes, the definition and classification of lexical chunks are vary fromperson to person, but these different definitions nearly have common essence.Jesperson is the first scholar who puts forward “formulaic sequence” in 1924. Hepoints out that formulaic sequences are not generated in accordance with the rules atthe time of use. And they can be retrieved from memory as a whole.After half century,Becker(1975) first proposes “Chunks”. He thinks, those fixedor semi-fixed structures should be regarded as the smallest unit of language. Here,“structure” focuses on its prefabricated characteristic,which has weakened the opinion“utterance is formed by words and relative rules”. His definition emphasizes theindivisibility of “chunks” as the smallest unit in memory. He also believes that if aword is regarded as the smallest unit in memory, the human brain will be toooverwhelmed to grasp language.Bolinger (1976) also argues that human’s language is not that full of creativity.What we said everyday is just repeating same words and sentences. The previousopinion “words and grammatical rules create utterances” is being challenged. On theone hand, speech fluency is not likely to be acquired through the integration ofgrammatical rules in brain. On the other hand, not all utterances in discourse areconformed to grammatical rules.Pawley & Syder (1983) find that native speakers can speak fluently, because theyuse a lot of lexicalized sentence stems that wholly or partly fixed in terms ofgrammatical form and lexical content.As more and more research have been done on lexical chunks, the definitions oflexical chunks become more concrete and systematical.
.........
Chapter Three Research Design...........19
3.1 Research Questions....... 19
3.2 Subjects.......19
3.3 Instruments.......... 19
3.3.1 Reading Comprehension Test......... 19#p#分页标题#e#
3.3.2 Lexical Chunks Identification Test...........21
3.3.3 Interview............. 21
3.4 Data Collection.... 21
3.5 Data Analysis........22
Chapter Four Results and Discussions..........24
4.1 English Proficiency........24
4.2 Lexical Chunks Identification.......... 25
4.3 Reading Comprehension.........26
4.4 Lexical Chunks Identification and Reading....... 29
4.5 Interview.....36
Chapter Five Conclusions and Implications...........39
5.1 Major Findings.... 39
5.2 Implications of the Study........39
5.3 Suggestions for Lexical Chunks Learning.......... 41
5.4 Limitations of the Present Study......42
5.5 Recommendation for Future Research......42
Chapter Five Conclusions and Implications
5.1 Major Findings
In order to find whether learners’ identification toward lexical chunks and theirreading ability have correlation or not, the author carries out this experiment. Throughthis experiment, the researcher has received the satisfying results. As we can see fromdata analysis, it can be concluded that the students have the awareness of lexicalchunks. Although some students know little about the concept of lexical chunks, theystill can identify those fixed collocations, set phrases and sentence structures. Then,the ability of recognizing lexical chunks is also closely related with readingcomprehension ability. The more lexical chunks the learners recognize, the strongertheir ability of reading comprehension. Lewis said(1993) “language is not often fromtraditional grammar and vocabulary, but often from multi-word prefabricatedchunks.” Therefore, lexical chunks are the building parts of natural language. Andunderstanding lexical chunks as a whole plays an important role in languageacquisition. Although the learners may know each individual word in simple passage,they cannot identify the lexical chunks with semantic information and fixed structure.It’s difficult for them to identify lexical chunks and understand the passageword-for-word, which always influence the accurate meaning the passage want toexpress. Obviously, just vocabulary learning and traditional grammar rules cannotmake the learners use English fluently. As Nattinger &DeCarrico (1992)pointed, thefluency of language depends on how many lexical chunks are stored in one’s mindrather than how many generated grammar rules are stored. As it was mentioned, it’seasier for learners to identify polywords and phrasal constraints because they arecommon in everyday English.The research findings tell that there is a strong and positive correlation betweenthe perception of lexical chunks and reading comprehension proficiency. That is to say,if the students have good second language proficiency and get higher scores inEnglish tests, they always can identify more lexical chunks.
..........
conclusion
Even though the researcher has tried best to investigate the correlation betweenthe perception of lexical chunks and reading comprehension proficiency throughexperiment, there are still some limitations in this thesis.First, the most obvious limitation is the small sample size. The subjects areselected from a convenient sample and the numbers are not enough. It just representsa group of English learners. Thus, they cannot represent the whole English learners’population. According to the statistical sense, the small sample will affect the externalvalidity of the experimental results, which in turn affects the promotion of theresearch.Second, another limitation is that two students didn’t hand in their paper and onestudent left the paper empty. One reason is that the lexical chunks identifying test isnot required to give scores. Carrying out this test is to figure out whether studentshave perception to lexical chunks or not, so this part is not scored. Another reason isthat the researcher wants the students complete the test without pressure. And severalstudents don’t attach much importance to it, which leads to unsatisfying result.
..........
References (abbreviated)
