语块对于英语习得中母语负迁移的修正作用研究

论文总字数：41565字

摘 要

近年来，语块在二语习得的研究领域里受到了越来越多的关注，语块在听力、口语及写作等的应用研究也随之增多，而随着翻译成为大学英语四六级考试改革重点，学者们也开始注重语块在翻译教学上的研究。语块教学法注重词块的整体记忆与运用，在翻译过程中，学习者从记忆中提取语块，简化了对词汇的加工过程从而减少搭配不当和母语在词汇、句法层面的负迁移，提高翻译的准确性和地道性。因此，提高学习者的语块意识对于他们二语习得水平的提高有积极意义。

本文主要研究语块教学对非英语专业大学生翻译能力的影响，试探讨语块意识及教学能否提高学生汉英翻译水平。本文的研究以《新大学英语综合教程》为教学材料，研究对象为高校大学英语高级课程的两个班级的41名非英语专业大学生，实验对象共分两个组，实验组20人，控制组21人,实验持续14天。通过短期实验后，对比两个班级实验前后两次翻译测试成绩发现，实验组的同学在试验后，翻译水平有所提升，证明了语块教学在提高学生翻译质量上有一定的积极作用，希望通过本次研究能提高二语学习者的语块意识，使其认识到语块学习对于学习者掌握目标语言的重要性，以此突出语块运用在当今二语习得的重要作用。

关键词：语块教学；翻译能力；英语

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

摘要 iii

Table of Contents iv

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the Study 1

1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study 1

1.3 Layout of the Thesis 2

Chapter Two Literature Review 3

2.1 Lexical Chunks 3

2.1.1 Definition of lexical chunks 3

2.1.2 Classification of lexical chunks 4

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Lexical Chunks in Second Language Acquisition 5

Chapter Three Research Design 8

3.1 Research Question 8

3.2 Participants 8

3.3 Instruments 8

3.3.1 Materials 8

3.3.2 Evaluating Method 9

3.4 Procedures 9

3.4.1 Pretest and posttest 9

3.4.2 Sample of the lexical approach 10

Chapter Four Data Analyses and Discussions 11

4.1 Analysis of the translation test 11

4.1.1 Analysis of test scores 11

4.1.2 Analysis of lexical chunks 12

4.2 Analysis of the questionnaire 13

Chapter Five Conclusion 15

5.1 Summary 15

5.2 Limitations 16

References 17

Appendix I 19

Appendix II 20

Appendix III 21

List of Tables

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of the Scores of Pretest of the Control Group and the Experimental Group 11

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of the Scores of Posttest of the Control Group and the Experimental Group 12

Table 3. Numbers of Lexical Chunks of the Control Group and the Experimental Group 12

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

Translation teaching is of importance in second language teaching, where translation competence has become one of the most significant basic skills for college students. Traditional teaching of English emphasizes memorization of vocabulary and grammar where syntax plays a key role in the system of language generation. Learners tend to generate sentences word by word based on syntactic rules. We can build countless sentences thanks to the creativity and recursiveness of language after we grasp certain grammatical rules and vocabulary. This rule-based system often costs more time and energy when assembling sentences in linguistic output. Speakers need to prefabricate a sentence structure and choose relevant words to achieve successful and fluent communication. However, influenced by factors such as negative transfer, cross-cultural gaps and so forth, learners may construct sentences which are grammatically correct but pragmatically inappropriate in communicative or translation process.

In recent decades, with the development of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, lexical chunks have been paid more attention to in second language acquisition, and the lexical approach is gradually accepted and experimented with in English classes. The lexical approach focuses more on storing and using the target language as a whole, which can largely reduce the burden of comprehending and memorizing linguistic elements so that they can improve the efficiency and fluency of information processing in one’s brains during target language output. Although most college students in China have learned English for many years, errors such as wrong collocations, Chinglish and misuses of words appear frequently during their translation. English teachers need to pay more attention to the improvement of students’ translation competence, especially for non-English majors who lack systematic translation training.

1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study

As one of the most important skills of language acquisition, translation competence is related to learners’ ability to decode mother tongue, deal with cultural discrepancy and encode sentences with knowledge of lexicon and grammar. Although college students in China have learned English for more than ten years and have memorized a significant number of words and various grammatical rules, their English proficiency is far from being satisfactory. Learners tend to construct sentences at the level of single words by grammar or conduct translation from their mother language structure word by word and word for word. As a result, they may not be able to produce appropriate or idiomatic sentences and to arrive at native-like proficiency in writing or translation. Related researches on second language acquisition suggest that successful learners are able to make conscious use of lexical chunks appropriately when the situation calls for it. In the process of both input and output, learners should pay more attention to lexical chunks. So it is necessary to arouse students’ awareness to lexical chunks and to use the lexical approach to improve their translation competence in terms of fluency, idiomaticity and readability.

This current study attempts to introduce lexical chunks and the lexical approach, find out the relationships between the use of lexical chunks and translation competence, and confirm the role of lexical chunks in second language acquisition. Then the thesis explores the application of lexical chunks in non-English majors’ translation at a university in China and their use of lexical chunks to analyze the effect of lexical chunks on students’ Chinese English translation.

1.3 Layout of the Thesis

This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One gives a general introduction to the thesis, which introduces the research background, significance and purpose of the study and the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review which briefly introduces lexical chunks, the lexical approach and related researches at home and abroad. Chapter Three is about the design of the experiment in some detail, which includes research questions, participants, instruments and the procedure. Chapter Four discusses the result of the experiment and the effects of lexical chunks on non-English majors’ translation. Chapter Five comes to a conclusion of the study which summarizes the result of the experiment and proposes possible improvement on the thesis.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Lexical Chunks

For the past several decades, an increasing number of researches have been conducted on lexical chunks with the deepening research in the fields of both first and second language acquisition. Linguists have discussed definitions, properties and functions of lexical chunks from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics, and found out that processing chunks of native speakers is the key to producing fluent language output. Previous researches suggest that learners’ proficiency, fluency and idiomaticity of their second language, to a large extent, relies on their capability to use lexical chunks.

2.1.1 Definition of lexical chunks

Lexical chunks are labeled variously and studied from different branches of linguistics with different definitions, revealing that researches on lexical chunks are multilayered, complicated and diverse. Becker (1975) defined lexical chunks as “form-meaning pairing” in his The Phase Lexicon and found that memorization, storage and output of language are not based on individual words but fixed or semi-fixed linguistic chunks. Pawley and Syder (1983) defined chunks as “lexicalized sentence stems”, pointing out that “a lexicalized sentence stem is a unit of clause length or longer, whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed and its fixed elements form a standard label for a culturally recognized concept” while Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) called chunks “lexical phrases”, thinking that there are a huge number of lexical phrases in humanity’s memory which consist of two or more than two words and such prefabricated language is essential and integral to language acquisition. In this thesis, the author will adopt the definition from Wary (2002), which is named “lexical chunks” and whose definition is “a sequence of words, continuous or discontinuous, which is prefabricated and is stored and retrieved from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar.”

In a word, lexical chunks, in the form of two or more than two words, are special multi-word phenomena between lexicon and syntactics, which have features of lexical items and grammar, and owns certain utterance functions. Although lexical chunks are defined variously from different aspects of linguistics, those definitions and functions that scholars have proposed are overlapping to some extent. They are prefabricated or semi-fixed language units, memorized and produced as a whole during one’s linguistic output.

2.1.2 Classification of lexical chunks

As discussed briefly aforementioned, many scholars and linguists have done researches on lexical chunks and given different definitions. Due to the diversity and complexity of chunks, linguists from different areas such as cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics classify lexical chunks according to their functions or structures. So there are different ways to classify them.

Among different kinds of classification, there is, to some extent, similarity in the classification between Nattinger amp; DeCarrico (1992) and Michael Lewis (1997); they connected lexical chunks with second language acquisition, which is helpful to this study. Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) classified lexical phrases into four categories by function and form, including polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraints and sentence builders. Polywords, canonical or non-canonical, are short continuous phrases and many content phrases account for this category such as verb phrases break through. Institutionalized expressions refer to those conventionalized expressions, usually in a sentence’s length. Proverbs, idioms, aphorisms and so on belong to this category, such as No pain, no gain and Long time no see. They are fixed, canonical and continuous and can be extracted under appropriate conditions without decoding the structure of the sentence. The third one is phrasal constraints whose inner structure is changeable on different communicative occasions. They are short to medium in length and can be regarded as a blank formula. Take a ___ ago for example. We can put year/day/very long time in the blank to express different kinds of intervals. The last category concerns sentence builders, which are used to organize sentences by providing framework for sentences, such as it-phrases.

Lewis also divided lexical chunks into four groups in his Implementing the Lexical Approach (1997), including complex words whose function is similar to polywords, frequent collocations, which appear frequently, institutionalized utterances which are fixed or semi-fixed combinations with pragmatic function and are similar to institutionalized expressions, and sentence frames and heads which are in effect the same as sentence builders.

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Lexical Chunks in Second Language Acquisition

Researches on lexical chunks started from the 1980s and many linguists in the west have studied the relationship between lexical chunks and second language acquisition. The theories of the lexical approach derive from researches on second language acquisition. Scholars have claimed that knowledge of genre-specific sequences contributes to communicative efficiency and fluency in language processing and production. Focuses on application of lexical chunks can be dated back to the 1980s, when Nattinger (1980) argued that language teaching should pay attention to lexical chunks because successful communication or expression is based on appropriate use of ready-made composites for certain situation. Later, in their Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching, Nattinger and DeCarrio (1992) argued for the importance of lexical chunks in second language teaching, introduced implications to apply lexical chunks for pedagogy and distinguished lexical chunks as social interactions, necessary topics and discourse devices for pedagogical purposes. They found that teaching activities based on lexical chunks could improve learners’ writing competence.

Another great contribution on the lexical approach made by Lewis in his Implementing the Lexical Approach (1997) has promoted the development of second language acquisition and he pointed out that, the key to the lexical approach is remembering that “language is grammaticalized lexis, but not lexicalized grammar.” Compared with traditional vocabulary-grammar dichotomy, the lexical approach enables learners to store and comprehend more lexis and syntactical knowledge and to use them in a more idiomatical way. He proposed the paradigm of “Observe-Hypothesize-Experiment” which requires learners to raise lexical awareness. He divided the process of input into the training stage and the consolidation stage for accumulation and extension of knowledge of lexical chunks.

With the development of the lexical approach, linguists began to study the effect of lexical chunks on both first and second language acquisition from different aspects of linguistics.

One of the most important achievements of the lexical theory in cognitive linguistics is that it breaks the dichotomy of vocabulary and grammar of structuralism and Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative Grammar which suggests that language output relies on combination of lexicon by inborn grammatical rules. Lewis (1993) maintained that building sentences by combining lexical chunks greatly reduces the pressure of information processing and improves the efficiency of language processing. This approach was widely applied in different second language classes such as writing, listening and speaking.

From the perspective of psycholinguistics, learners’ communicative fluency and proficiency is achieved by the quantity of lexical chunks they have stored in their brains, rather than the acquisition of generative rules of syntax they have learned. Native-like acquisition is mainly attributed to plenty of stored lexical chunks (AnnelieÄdel, BrittErman, 2012).

Lewis (1997) claimed that acquisition of language and improvement of communicative ability is realized by enlarging the input of lexical chunks. Skehan (1998) thought that second language learners develop interlanguage in two ways: rule-based learning and exemplar-based learning. The latter one is to build prefabricated chunks which enable learners to master lexical items in larger units and decode grammatical rules.

Research on phraseology in applied linguistics has shown that effective use of recurrent multi-word expressions or lexical bundles is central to the building of written and spoken academic discourse. After comparing mother language and second language acquisition, Nattinger and DeCarrico (2002) concluded that second language learners can summarize syntactic and morphological rules by recognizing and analyzing a large amount of lexical chunks.

Domestically, research on chunks mainly focuses on the relationship between lexical bundles and word acquisition, and the influence of lexical chunks on second language writing and speaking. Wang and Zhang (2007) compared the use of verb phrases which are used frequently between English learners in China and native speakers of English by means of a corpus-based approach and found that there is evident discrepancy of the use of verb phrases between native speakers and learners while learners tend to use informal collocation under the influence of mother tongue, so language teaching should focus more on collocative strategies.

Many researchers supported the significant role of lexical chunks in second language acquisition and some of them tried to prove the effects of the lexical approach in different teaching experiments (Wu, 2014; Huang, 2015; Cao amp; Zhang, 2016). Prefabricated chunks are effective tools to develop interlanguage and should be paid attention to as they can be performed as a whole quickly during verbal communications without knowing their inner structure as a language chunk, so that learners could improve proficiency and fluency. (Wang amp; Zhang, 2009). Fang (2010) argued that in the process of language acquisition, influenced by language environment, language level, cognitive strategies, psychological factors and so on, language learners may not be able to reach the initial efficiency during the initial acquisition. The lexical approach, to some extent, reduces the influence of fossilization, enhances learners’ senses of language as well as their linguistic competence. Xu (2015) summarized the functions of prefabricated chunks and pointed out that the use of chunks can improve learners’ consistency, accuracy and confidence. The inner structure of prefabricated chunks is relatively stable and they can use those lexical chunks without too much processing so that the burden of output has been reduced. Investigating the use of lexical chunks in Chinese students’ writing of different grades, Ruan (2017) suggested that the level of acquisition is positively correlated with their use of lexical chunks.

Chapter Three Research Design

3.1 Research Question

This thesis attempts to investigate the use of lexical chunks in Chinese-English translation on the part of college students and tries to answer the following research questions:

1. What roles do lexical chunks play during the translation process?
2. Can the lexical approach improve students’ translation competence?

3.2 Participants

In the current research, participants are 41 non-English majors in two classes of Advanced College English Course at Southeast University. The subjects are students who have attended the English placement test at the beginning of their freshman year and entered College English Courses Band IV class. After they passed the exams of College English Courses Band IV, they entered these two advanced English classes. They are English learners from the same level.

Before the experiment began, the author collected scores of CET4 of all students in both classes to make sure that the samples and results of the experiment are reliable. The average score of the experimental group is 605.25, the highest score is 650 and the lowest score is 560. In the control group, the average score is 581.85, the highest and lowest score is 636 and 525 respectively. Then, the scores between two classes are compared with independent sample t-test, where the value of Sig. is 0.187. The value is bigger than 0.005, which proves that there is no significant discrepancy between the two groups.

3.3 Instruments

3.3.1 Materials

In this experiment, teaching materials and supplementary reading materials about “employment”, which meet the requirement of reading difficulty for college students, are extracted from New College English Integrated Course III and IV published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Translation test materials are extracted from mock exams of CET-4 which have the same difficulty for participants in both the experimental group and the control group.

3.3.2 Evaluating Method

In view of this current attempt to investigate the use of lexical chunks in non-English majors’ translation, the translation test was evaluated by the use of lexical chunks by two raters who have learned lexical chunks for several years under the supervision of a professor at Southeast University, who is experienced in translation teaching in English majors classes and is familiar with the lexical theories and standards of lexical evaluation. The author took the average score by two raters to improve the reliability of the experiment. Because of the short-term experiment, the evaluation focuses on the use of lexical chunks and the quality of translation also accounts.

Data analysis is conducted by means of SPSS.22, where descriptive statistics and independent sample t-test are employed to find out the differences of the influence of the lexical approach and traditional teaching on the participants.

3.4 Procedures

The experiment lasts 14 days from 11 to 25, May, 2018. One unit about “employment” is taught and related readings are delivered as supplementary materials for students. The control group is taught by means of a traditional method which features word meaning and grammatical rules explanation while the experimental group is taught with a focus on lexical chunks.

3.4.1 Pretest and posttest

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