On the Phraseology of Chinese College Student Oral English in Public Speaking

Abstract

Prior investigations of phraseology have systematically researched the teaching and learning of phraseology in EFL setting. Nevertheless, little research has been done specifically on the phraseology of Chinese college student oral English in public speaking. This study sets out to study the formal and functional features of phraseology in a self-built corpus containing 300 speeches delivered by Chinese college students by comparing them against those of native speakers. It has been found that the overall use of phraseology by Chinese college students bears a resemblance to that by native speakers across the four structural types of chunks, including polywords, phrasal constraints, institutionalized expressions and sentence builders. On the other hand, Chinese college students show some unique features in the use of phraseology, including the lack of diversity and the over-reliance on some chunks, etc. The findings of this study also provide significant pedagogical implications for teaching spoken English, especially English public speaking.