Chapter1 Introduction
1.1The Background of the Study
Oral fluency is crucial in learning English. It is also an important measurement injudging how well one grasps the learning language. For a college student in China, thetime for English learning is averagely 7 years, during which students spend most oftheir time preparing for exams, and since there is no oral test for various entranceexams, students do not put much emphasis on their spoken English. When learners areput into a real English environment, most of them cannot open their mouth to expressthemselves. Obviously, our college students seriously lack the competence ofspeaking.How can we help college students to enhance their speaking ability? Unlikenative speakers, few second language learners speak fluently in the second language.Many researchers have explored different ways to enhance their oral fluency. Theyfound that lexical phrases play a crucial role in native speakers’ spoken language andwritten language. (Bolinger, 1976; Sinclair, 1991; Nattinger and Decarrico, 1992).Towell et al. (1996) pointed out that the crucial point to speech fluency lies in theautomatization of a repertoire in terms of formulaic speech units, often called lexicalphrases, multi-word strings, lexical chunks or frames which are retrieved whole fromlong-term memory as if they were single words. Going without conscious endeavor,control, and short-term collection, the words embedded in the memory are drawnautomatically. Pawley and Syder (1983) pointed that formulaic sequences by Englishspeakers are programmed faster than non-formulaic structures . Of course, there is along way for the development of spoken language research. The further study shouldbe emphasized to impede the improvement of college students' oral fluency.
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1.2The Purpose of the Present Study
The purpose of the present research is to study the characteristics of Englishmajors’ oral fluency between two groups and whether there is difference between twogroups in lexical phrases use. First, the present researcher chose 12 students in thecorpus whose ranks are top 1 and top 2 as high-level group; and the other 12 studentsfrom the corpus whose ranks are bottom 1 and bottom 2 as the low-level group. Thenthe Cool Edit Pro software is used to describe and measure students' oral fluency inthe corpus. All these data were put into SPSS to show the characteristics of oralfluency between two groups according to five indices. Then, the researcher furtherinvestigated how English learners of different oral fluency differ in the aspect oflexical phrases use. This study is also useful in language pedagogy since it can helplearners in enhancing their fluency. The goal of the research is to help improve thequality of oral English learning and teaching. It is hoped that those implications woulddo a help to English learners’ oral fluency in order to reach the goal of fluent Englishcommunication.
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Chapter2 Literature Review
2.1 Lexical Phrases
Nowadays, there is a concept prevailing that language is naturally formulaic.Saussure (1916/1966:177) is the first person to make the observation: “When acompound concept is expressed by a succession of very common significant units, themind gives up analysis - it takes a short cut - and applies the concept to the wholecluster of signs, which then becomes a simple unit”. In other words, we prestore whatwe are going to say in our mind with the form of multiword units, with no need toapply grammar rules.These forms of multiword units make a large proportion of discourse. Alterberg(1998) pointed that “as much as 80％ of the language used by an adult native speakermay be chunks of varying length”. Erman and Warren (2000) found that in the spokenEnglish, all kinds of formulaic sequences occupy 58.6% of the whole information andwhile in written discourse, formulaic sequences occupy 52.3% of the wholeinformation. Foster (2000) found that in the unplanned native speech, formulaiclanguage occupied 32.3% of the whole information. Thus, it is recognized that chunksare very important in language use. So it is necessary to pay more attention on chunklearning.Charles Fillmore (1979) found that the mastery of formulaic expressions played arather important role in getting along in a language. Jackendoff (1995) concludedfrom a small corpus study of spoken language in a TV quiz show that formulaicsequences might be of equal significance to the lexicon of single words.
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2.2 Oral Fluency
In the development of the oral fluency research, many definitions have made byexperts. From the perspective of mother tongue, Lennon (1975) and Fillmore (1979)have defined the oral fluency. From the perspective of second language, Brumfit(1984), Fraercher et al.(1984), Sjavaara (1987), Lennon(1990) and Schmidt (1992)have made the definition of oral fluency.Lesson (1975:136) made a definition of oral fluency as “the ability of the speakerand semantic exigencies of a given natural language on the basis of a finite exposureto a finite corpus of that language”. From this, we know that oral fluency is learner’slevel of perceiving second language. Additionally, from the perspective of speechproduction, Fillmore (1979:93) provided four parts of ability of using first language.They are “the ability to fill time with talk”, “the ability to tab in coherent, reasoned,and ‘semantically dense’ sentences”, “the ability to have appropriate things to say in awide range of contexts”, and “the ability to be creative and imaginative in languageuse”. Brumfit (1984) thought that oral fluency could be used both in the speechproduction and speech perception, such as speaking ,writing, listening and reading. Hegave the definition of oral fluency as fluent usage and operation in the secondlanguage.Arevart＆Nation(1991) gave the definition of oral fluency as the ability ofefficiently using second language. Sajavaara (1987) thought that oral fluency includedacceptability and continuity because in his view, language production concerned withmany social and cultural factors besides the necessary language skills. In the sameway, Meisel (1987) supported Sajavaara’s view and thought that oral fluency is kindof “communicative acceptability”.
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Chapter 3 Research Methodology .........19
3.1 The Introduction of Sample Corpus .........19
3.2 The Research Questions in the Present Study .........20
3.3 Subjects .........20
3.4 Cool Edit Pro .........21
3.5 Data Analysis.........22
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion .........26
4.1 Characteristics of L2 Oral Fluency between Two Groups.........26
4.2 Results of Use of Lexical Phrases between the Top Group and the BottomGroup.........29
4.3 Discussion of the Results .........33
Chapter 5 Conclusions and Implications.........38
5.1 The Major Findings in the Present Study .........38
5.2 Some Pedagogical Implications .........39
5.3 The Limitations of Present Study.........41
Chapter 4 Results and Discussion
4.1 Characteristics of L2 Oral Fluency between Two Groups
The five important indices consist of speech rate (SR), articulation rate (AR),phonation/time ratio (PTR), mean length of run (MLR) and average length of pause(ALP). These indices are calculated from the data of the number of syllables, thenumber of pauses, the time of pauses and the time spent in speaking. Descriptivestatistics of the five indices of each group include number, maximum value, minimumvalue, mean and standard deviation. Table 6 shows the result of U-test on SR, AR, PTR, MLR and ALP between twogroups. For the result of SR, we can see the Sig value is 0.000 which is less than 0.05.That is to say there is significant difference between two groups in the aspect of SR.The Sig value of AR is 0.033 which is less than 0.05. So, there is significantdifference between two groups on the aspect of AR. We can see the Sig value of PTRis 0.001 which is much less than 0.05. That is to say there is significant differencebetween two groups in the aspect of PTR. We can see the Sig value of MLR is 0.000which is less than 0.05. So there is significant difference between two groups in theaspect of MLR. It also shows the Sig value of ALP is 0.088 which is more than 0.05.That is to say there is no significant difference between two groups in the aspect ofALP. From the analysis above, we could find out that there is significant differencebetween two groups in the aspect of SR, AR, PTR and MLR. So, in all, it is sure thatthere is significant difference of oral fluency between two groups.
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Conclusion
As the above, in the oral fluency study, there are five indices. They are speakingrate, articulation rate, mean length of run, phonation/time ratio and the average lengthof pause. The U-test (see Table 6) shows there is significant difference between twogroups. The results show that top group learners has a higher speaking rate, a higherarticulation rate, a longer mean length of run and a higher phonation/time ratio thanthat of the bottom group learners. So, compared with the low oral fluency students,the characteristics of high oral fluency students are a higher speaking rate, a higherarticulation rate, a longer mean length of run and a higher phonation/time ratio. There is indeed significant difference between the top group learners and thebottom group learners in the aspect of use frequency but not persity and averagelength of lexical phrases. Top group learners are more capable of using lexical phrasesin the aspect of use frequency than the bottom group learners. According to Instancemodel, language learning is a process of lexical chunks accumulation and theapplication of lexical phrases in performance. Actual instances of production arejudged by direct access to ready-made chunks. So, fluent speakers’ languageproceeding is quicker when they base their utterances on the form and content.
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References (omitted)