Lexical Chunks Research Articles

Turn-taking in Korean conversation

On the basis of Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking model, I explore the flexibility of the Korean turn-taking system. Noting first that speakers bring a turn to a stop without projected final turn elements, I propose that the turn stop is a legitimate completion specifiable as a transition-relevance place (TRP). I view turn construction as a process of improvisation in which lexical chunks are accumulated one after another to deliver a recognizable action; a TRP is thus constituted at the completion of a lexical chunk loosely tied to a prior lexical chunk. In parallel, a turn stop occurs at a lexical boundary in which the lexical chunks thus far accumulated have conveyed a complete action. I argue that any lexical boundary can serve as a TRP on the condition of action completion, as negotiated and determined by the participants’ shared knowledge and experiences. This flexibility of TRP constitution is proposed as a specification of Sacks et al.’s (1974) generic model applied to Korean conversation.

A Contrastive Study on the Use of Lexical Chunk Among Chinese Learners of Different Proficiency Levels

This study examines the juniors’ and sophomores’ writings with the same prompt, attempting to investigate the general pictures of their lexical chunk (“lexical chunk” is abbreviated to LC) use and the main features of using LC categories. The study shows the following results: (a) Juniors generally have higher frequency of using LC, especially in using 4 LC categories: topic-related LC (TRLC), sentence-building LC (SBLC), general LC (GLC) and opinion-presented LC (OPLC), except discourse LC (DLC). (b) In terms of using LC categories, juniors show a better proficiency of SBLC noticeably, which is revealed by their better-structured sentences, rich diversity of SBLC and more native-like sentence logic. (c) Juniors and sophomores show similarity in using TRLC in that their choices of topic-related lexical phrases are both extremely influenced by writing prompt. (d) Juniors employ less DLC than sophomores because juniors attach more importance to the idea, opinion and proof, while sophomores rely more on the signal words of passage due to the purpose of gaining scores and using DLC as facilitators to make the whole passage coherent. (e) Juniors use OPLC more frequently and diversely, while sophomores overuse a certain OPLC.

Non-English Majors’ Listening Teaching based on Lexical Chunks Theory and Schema Theory

<p>English listening is seen as a vital means of linguistic input for Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, which lays a solid foundation for English learning and communication with English speakers. Besides, with increasing of scores of the listening part in the newly-reformed CET-4 and CET-6 (CET refers to college English test in China and both tests are the evaluation criteria of non-English majors’ English proficiency), it is urgent to improve non-English majors’ listening abilities in language teaching. However, students find listening to English stressful and painful and it is hard for them to process information quickly enough when listening. Meanwhile, their listening abilities cannot be improved effectively by the traditional English listening teaching methods. Researchers at home and abroad have discussed listening strategies, but seldom study the combination of lexical chunks theory and schema theory in improving non-English majors’ listening. Therefore, this research first proposes a lexical chunks schema-oriented listening teaching method which can effectively improve non-English majors’ listening abilities and then conducts an empirical study to verify its effectiveness. As the lexical chunks schema-oriented listening teaching method suggests, activities about memorization, recognition and reconstruction of lexical chunks, activation of the existed schema and building up new schema should be carried out in pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening in the listening class.</p>

词块教学的多模态设计研究

基于词块理论和多模态话语分析理论，本文从英语词汇学习的输入源头出发，融合了词块教学法和多模态教学法两种新兴教学法的优势，对英语词汇教学进行了一次全新的教学探索。课堂教学实践表明，教师应该充分合理地利用各种教学手段和资源，实现多模态词块教学。这种全新的教学方法能够帮助学生快速有效地习得词汇，从而提高学生的英语语言能力和语言运用能力。 Based on the theories of Lexical Chunks and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this paper starts from the input source of English vocabulary learning, and has the advantages of blending Lexical Ap-proach and Multimodal Teaching. This is a new teaching practice, particularly to the English vo-cabulary teaching nowadays. The teaching practice in classroom has shown that the teachers should utilize various kinds of teaching means and teaching resources fully and reasonably, and achieve multimodal teaching. This new teaching method is helpful to promote students to learn vocabulary quickly and effectively and improve students’ English language competence and performance.

Musical looping of lexical chunks: An exploratory study

This paper reports on the experimental use of a recently developed musical looping app with a class of Japanese university students of English during 2014. Working in groups using shared hand-held devices, students created compositions based on lexical chunks or formulaic sequences selected freely from a fixed text. A scored example of one such group composition is included in the paper. During research, the author acted as instructor and a participant/ observer role afforded an intimate view of the educational process. Self-assessment questionnaires prior to and post working with Loopy indicate that students experienced increased confidence in their ability to produce spoken English over a three-month period. The affordances and constraints of using the musical app to learn English are examined and a significant increase in speech rate when reading from a fixed text is also noted.

Musical looping of lexical chunks: An exploratory study

This paper reports on the experimental use of a recently developed musical looping app with a class of Japanese university students of English during 2014. Working in groups using shared hand-held devices, students created compositions based on lexical chunks or formulaic sequences selected freely from a fixed text. A scored example of one such group composition is included in the paper. During research, the author acted as instructor and a participant/observer role afforded an intimate view of the educational process. Self-assessment questionnaires prior to and post working with Loopy indicate that students experienced increased confidence in their ability to produce spoken English over a three-month period. The affordances and constraints of using the musical app to learn English are examined and a significant increase in speech rate when reading from a fixed text is also noted.

Spoken lexical chunks used by successful learners at B2 level: forms and functions

This study analyses the lexical chunks used in successful spoken language by a sample of learners at Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) B2 level in the speaking component of a four-skills test. The data forms the initial part of a corpus of speaking tests at this level and the intention is to provide practitioners and researchers with evidence in order to more clearly interpret the broad ‘can do’ statements of the CEFR. Results suggest that the most frequent chunks used at this level employ the first thousand most frequent words in the British National Corpus (BNC) spoken lists and are often comparable to frequent chunks used in native speaker corpus data. The findings also show that learners make use of a narrow range of multi-functional chunks rather than employing a range of items for one function. Moreover, some chunks we normally would expect to find at this level were underused. The data has implications for how spoken language, in this case, chunks, could be taught to students at this level and for further research in this area.

A Study on the Use of Lexical Chunks by Chinese EFL Learners in Writing

<p>Lexical Approach put forward by Michael Lewis (1993) is widely acknowledged in EFL teaching and lexical teaching is very important development in the evolution of language teaching (Lowe, 2003).<strong> </strong>For about thirty years of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in China, more and more teachers have realized the importance of teaching and encouraging learners to use ready-made lexical chunks. However, the present study focuses on the overuse of lexical chunks in learners’ writings in a high stake national test (College English Test Band 6 – CET6). The corpus-based data analysis will be done to find the most commonly used lexical chunks by Chinese EFL learners and demonstrate what is meant to be the overuse of lexical chunks. Furthermore, the reasons for misuse and overuse of lexical chunks will be discussed. The findings drawn from structural and functional analysis of lexical chunks also have some pedagogical implications.</p>

Teaching lexical chunks on retention and production of referential and collocational meaning of lexis among the Iranian EFL learners

This study focuses on the role of collocations in language teaching. Due to vagueness in definition and categorization, the collocations are being divided into two types: referential collocations meaning being recognizable by just referring to single word companies, and inferential collocations being the types that the meaning cannot be easily discerned by non-native speakers of English. This study compares these two types of collocations and found that learners had more difficulty in producing the collocations while contrary to some studies they also do not recognize the inferential or referential collocations and face difficulty recognizing or producing them. Keywords: collocation, inferential, referential.

Impacts of Chunks Input on Chinese English Major Students’ Oral Production

Chunks have been a hot research in the field of second language acquisition since the 1970s. Aiming to explore the impacts of chunks input on Chinese English major students’ oral production, two classes of sophomore English major students were chosen as research subjects who were defined as the control group and the experimental group. Oral tests were taken before and after the research. After using chunks input in English teaching for 12 weeks and comparing the differences between the experimental group and the control group, the impact of lexical chunks on oral production was observed. Based on the analysis of the statistics, it’s found that chunks input in teaching plays a significant role in improving Chinese English Major Students’ speaking proficiency. The speaking test after the research showed that the fluency and accuracy of students in the experimental group had improved a lot during this period. Though students’ speaking ability in the control group did improve, their performance was not as significant as that of experimental students. It’s hoped that the result could provide any guidance for English teaching in China.

A constructionist approach to the teaching of phrasal verbs

The central issue of the present article is the analysis of phrasal verbs (hereafter termed multiword verbs [MWVs]) from the perspective ofconstruction grammars(Goldberg, 1995; Suttle and Goldberg, 2011). As is well known, English MWVs present special challenges to L2 learners due, among other things, to the shapelessness of their conceptual components and the ensuing impossibility to arrive at equivalent word-meaning correspondences (mappings) in the learners’ mother language (see Gilletteet al., 1999). This brings us to the first theoretical claim of this paper – namely, that MWVs (also termed phrasal verbs, verb-particle collocations, verb-particle combinations etc.) are lexical chunks that can be retrieved by speakers either as wholes, without special recourse to syntactic parsing, or as verb-particle semantic associations (Cappelleet al., 2010). This idea is combined with the notion that MWVs inherit their syntax-semantics from prototypicalArgument Structure Constructions(Goldberg, 2013a) withinVerb Argument Constructions(VACs) frames. VACs are thus associated with prototype verbs like‘go‘, ‘come’, ‘get’, ‘put’, etc., to project their meaning upon less-frequent verbs occupying aV-slot frame(a verbal position). It follows that MWVs function ashyponymsthat express specific semantic nuances not available in prototype verbs. For example, in the sentence ‘Aryascooped upa rock and hurled it at Joffrey's head’ (George R. R. Martin,A Game of Thrones[1996]), the verbscoop upsuggests acaused motionusually conveyed by the verbLIFT, i.e. the prototype of thesimple transitive Verb Argument Construction. From this vantage, it is suggested that a way to activate the weak verb-object interface is through its assignation to specific prototypesbootstrapping(providing an initial basis for) both the conceptualisation of the MWVs and their potential mapping to specific words (which I term inherited surface forms).

Key Lexical Chunks in Applied Linguistics Article Abstracts

In any discourse domain, certain chunks are particularly frequent and deserve attention by the novice to be initiated and by the expert to maintain a sense of community. To make a relevant contribution to the awareness about applied linguistics texts and discourse, this study attempted to develop lists of lexical chunks frequently used in the abstracts of applied linguistics journals. The abstracts from all the issues of 30 applied linguistics journals which were published before August 1, 2013 were collected. These abstracts which generated a corpus of 2,750,000 words were submitted to the program AntConc for chunk extraction. The long list of chunks in the output was shortlisted based on frequency and inclusiveness of shorter chunks. These were classified into textual and content n-grams. The article also presents the frequent chunks which serve as starting points in bringing up different aspects of research reports. The practical value of the results is briefly discussed at the end of the article.

Learning Spanish wine Language through Lexical Chunks

Abstract This paper provides a window on the role of creating a self-study language course for wine-growers from a beginners’ level, with the aim of gaining insights into the use of lexical chunks in language for specific purposes (LSP) teaching and learning. It focuses on describing the practical aspects, such as material design or chunk parsing, of a specific project named VinoLingua. But it also aims at going beyond our individual practice to set out the sources and grounds of the VinoLingua scientific framework and to examine the ideas about language and learning on which our approach is based: the importance of working with real language corpora and the use of standardised expressions and off-the-peg chunks of varying degrees of complexity for LSP teaching and learning. It may, therefore, serve as a model for any basic language courses designed for other professional groups.

An exploration of the phonology of lexical chunks in L2 speech

It is widely accepted that pauses and correspondence with intonation units are among the phonological cues that identify lexical chunks (conventionalised multiword sequences) in spoken first and second language, although conclusive empirical evidence is scant. This article reports on an exploratory study which seeks to identify the main phonological markers of lexical chunks. A corpus of five minutes of speech from four English learners of Spanish was collected and transcribed orthographically. The data-set contained 97 chunks, between 11 and 30 chunks per speaker. The lexical chunks were extracted using speech analysis software and analysed phonologically in respect of pauses, intonational boundaries and sentence position. The analyses revealed that only about half of the chunks in the data were delimited by intonational boundaries. Certain types of lexical chunks, such as discourse markers, consistently coincided with intonational boundaries, especially in sentence initial position. The most proficient speakers used more discourse markers, separated by intonational boundaries, which enhanced the perceived fluency of their utterances.

An Empirical Study on the Application of Lexical Chunk to College English Writing

In China, English, as an important tool for self-expression and mutual communication, is paid great attention to all over the country and College English has become a compulsory course at all colleges and universities. English writing is one of the most important language skills for college students. For a long time, English writing has been the throe throat for college students, which manifests in the aspects that students have poor vocabulary and employ much Chinglish expression in their essays, hindering them from expressing themselves clearly. Many linguists and teachers have been doing research on foreign language teaching, trying to find an effective way to improve the students’ foreign language acquisition especially foreign language writing. And thus the approach of employing the lexical chunks to teaching was put forward. The approach of teaching English writing by chunks offers a new way of solving the problems. Based on the previous research, the author thinks it necessary to probe into teaching English writing by lexical chunks so as to improve students’ writing ability. This study increases the input of English Lexical Chunk to College English writing and analyzes the effect of this method on students’ writing by conducting experimental research. According to the experiment analysis, it is concluded that increase of Lexical Chunk input can reduce the negative transfer of the native language, thus improving their writing in terms of wording collocation, sentence building, discourse cohesion and expression.

The creation of learner-centred dictionaries for endangered languages: a Rotuman example

This article examines the creation of dictionaries for endangered languages (ELs). Though each dictionary is uniquely prepared for its users, all dictionaries should be based on sound principles of vocabulary learning, including the importance of lexical chunks, as emphasised by Michael Lewis in his Lexical Approach. Many of the decisions that a lexicographer needs to make when creating an EL dictionary are discussed here, with information about how each issue was handled in the creation of an online dictionary of Rotuman, which is an Oceanic language, the majority of whose members live in diasporic communities in English-speaking nations. This article argues for the necessity of training EL members in how to use their dictionary.

Combining intuition with corpus linguistic analysis: A study of marked lexical chunks in four Chinese students’ undergraduate assignments

In the literature on lexical chunks, a dichotomy is frequently implied between intuitionbased methods of finding language ‘formulaic’ and frequency-based means of extracting ‘n-grams’. In this paper, a case study of four Chinese students’ undergraduate assignments is described in terms of marked or atypical lexical chunks revealed through close reading and those found through keyword analysis, when compared with a reference corpus of similar writing by British undergraduates. The paper discusses the benefits of combining the two approaches, arguing that this gives clearer insights into the personal phraseological profiles of the students’ writing than either can offer alone.

Lexical Approach and Its Application in College English Classes

As a composite of language form and function, lexical chunks indicate the positive interaction of semantics, syntax and pragmatics to promote further development of language utterances. The theory of lexical chunks is popular for college English teachers to adopt in their classes. Based on theories of lexical chunks and lexical approach, this paper aims to discover the effective way for the College English classes in China so as to improve students’ language proficiency.

Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados (review)

Reviewed by: Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados Regina Morin Verdonk, Robert, and María Jesús Mancho Duque, eds. Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 349. ISBN 978-90-420-3117-3. Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados is a collection of high-quality scholarly articles written in Spanish and presented in two parts. The introduction (7–20) provides a thorough discussion of how neologisms enter into a language, either through language-internal morphological, semantic, and syntactic mechanisms, or through linguistic borrowing. It also carefully discusses the content of each article. The volume as a whole is extremely well documented, and contains at the end an extensive bibliography (273–330) and an index of terms (331–49). The eight contributions in the first part, “Neología en los tecnolectos del Siglo de Oro,” examine neology and obsolescence in the specialized language of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Spanish naval affairs, medicine, astronomy and cosmography, jurisprudence, finance, navigation, mathematics, and economics. Most approach their subject matter in a similar fashion, examining a variety of Golden Age texts and analyzing attestations of word-level neology, resulting either from derivational and compositional morphological processes, or from lexical borrowing and subsequent adaptation. Two essays take a somewhat different approach. Gómez de Enterría (93–109) examines the lexical innovations of a single writer, José de la Vega, in his treatise on the buying and selling of stocks in seventeenth-century Europe, and Quirós García (149–67) focuses on the creation of syntagmatic combinations (sintagmación) or lexical chunks, rather than on word-level neology in sixteenth-century economics treatises. The second part, “Neología en la lengua general del Siglo de Oro,” contains five contributions that examine neology in the general language of the period. Anula (171–96) applies the criterion of frequency of use rather than first attestation to examine the creation, from 1474 to 1700, of words ending in –ada and –azo that denote types of blows (golpe). Clavería Nadal (197–212) discusses the neologisms and related commentary appearing in the 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Covarrubias. Colón Domènech (213–37) compares a portion of Nebrija’s 1493 Diccionario latino–español with the corresponding part of Cardoso’s 1570 Dictionarium Latino–Lusitanicum to identify similarities and differences in a sampling of the sixteenth–century lexicon of Spanish and Portuguese. Espinosa Elorza (239–54) questions whether the neologism amen de (both ‘except for’ and ‘in addition to’) can be correctly attributed to Cervantes, as has been the case to date. The final contribution, by Jiménez Ríos (255–72), discusses the range of strategies employed by Fray Vicente de Burgos in a late fifteenth-century Spanish translation of De las Propiedades de las Cosas, a medieval encyclopedia compiled in the early decades of the thirteenth century by Bartolomé Ánglico. The essays in Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados are written in academic Spanish and assume at least a basic knowledge of the processes involved in linguistic evolution; derivational, compositional, and syntagmatic neology; linguistic borrowing; and phonological and morphological adaptation. However, the clearly written and well-illustrated introduction goes a long way towards making the volume accessible to readers with a basic command of linguistics and an interest in the subject matter. This is a collection that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Spanish lexicon, especially scholars and graduate students in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, and those working on modern-day neology, especially that resulting from linguistic borrowing. Each of the essays in the first part, “Neología en los tecnolectos del Siglo de Oro,” can stand alone. [End Page 368] However, read together they form a coherent whole that presents a rich picture of linguistic, but also social, political, technological, and economic forces that can lead to and sustain lexical evolution. To give just a few examples, Gutiérrez Rodilla (41–56) discusses the societal pressures...

Applying corpus linguistics and conversation analysis in the investigation of small group teaching in higher education

AbstractIn this paper, we consider how a combined corpus linguistics and conversation analysis methodology can reveal new insights into the relationship between interaction patterns, language use, and learning. The context of the paper is higher education small group teaching sessions and our data are drawn from a one million word corpus, the Limerick-Belfast Corpus of Academic Spoken English (LI-BEL CASE). Our methodology combines corpus linguistics (CL) and applied conversation analysis (CA), enabling quantitative findings to be elaborated by more close-up qualitative analysis of sequences of interaction. Using a combined CL and CA approach (henceforth CLCA) enables us to consider more closely the relationships between, for example, interaction patterns and lexical chunks and to evaluate the extent to which tutors create or prevent opportunities for learning. Using CLCA, we offer a more detailed description of the linguistic and interactional features of turns at talk and consider how these features combine in the joint enterprise of meaning-making. Put simply, CLCA enables us to characterize seminar talk in a more systematic way. Starting at the level of turn, and using CA to move to a higher level of discourse, we can identify specific features of the spoken interaction, such as sequential organisation and topic management. Similarly, starting again at the level of turn but using CL, we can move our analysis to lower levels of discourse, such as cluster and word patterns, in order to see how words combine. This CLCA approach offers a fuller, richer description of talk in small-group teaching than would be found using either CA or CL alone. Finally, we offer an evaluation of a CLCA methodology and consider its applications in other research settings.