语块理论在法律英语学习中的有效性研究

论文总字数：40702字

摘 要

本课题立足于语块理论在法律英语这一专门用途英语学习中的应用。选取国内权威法律英语教材、期刊、杂志等文献资料构建法律英语语料库，运用语料分析软件制作高频法律英语语块表，以制作的语块表为基础设计实验方案，进行对照实验。通过对比学生运用语块表学习法律英语前后的词汇量和阅读水平，同时结合问卷调查，探明学生对语块表的态度与意见，最后运用数据分析软件分析实验与问卷调查数据，较为全面地验证语块理论对法律英语学习的有效性。

在本次研究中，除了指导学生运用高频法律英语专业术语语块表进行自主学习外，实验还设计了网络授课环节。以高频法律英语专业术语语块表为基础，选取代表性法律话题，归纳话题语块，辅以分析讲解，帮助学生建立话题语块意识，自主地将语块理论运用于法律英语学习中。

运用SPSS分析学生实验前后的词汇测试和阅读测试成绩发现，实验前后成绩呈现出明显的差异性。实验后词汇和阅读成绩明显高于实验前。实验后对学生开展的问卷调查结果显示，绝大部分学生认为高频法律英语专业术语语块表对他们的法律英语学习有很大帮助。实验和问卷调查结果验证了语块理论运用于法律英语学习的有效性。

本研究为法律英语学习提供了一种高效可靠的学习方法，也可为高校法律英语教学提供适量启示。

关键词：语块教学法，法律英语，词汇量，阅读水平

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

List of Tables 1

Chapter One Introduction 2

1.1 Background of the Study 2

1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study 3

1.3 Layout of the Thesis 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 5

2.1 Definition of Lexical Chunks 5

2.2 Definition of Legal English 5

2.3 Previous Studies of Lexical Chunks in English Learning 5

2.4 Previous Studies of Lexical Chunks in Legal English Learning 6

Chapter Three Research Design 8

3.1 Research Questions 8

3.2 Participants 8

3.3 Instrutments 8

3.2.1 Experiment 8

3.2.2 Questionaire 13

3.4 Data analysis and discussions 14

Chapter Four Results and Discussion 6

4.1 Effectiveness of Lexical Approach on Legal English Vocabulary Enrichment 6

4.2 Effectiveness of Lexical Approach on Legal English Reading Competence Enrichment 16

4.3 Effectiveness of Lexical Approach to the Study of Legal English 7

Chapter Five Conclusions 18

5.1 Summary 18

5.3 Limitations and suggestions 18

References 19

Appendix Ⅰ 21

Appendix Ⅱ 23

List of Tables

Table 1: Two-word legal English professional terminology chunks 10

Table 2: Three-word legal English professional terminology chunks 11

Table 3: Lawsuit topic 12

Table 4: Vocabulary scores before and after the experiment 13

Table 5: Reading scores before and after the experiment 14

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

With the advancement of economic globalization and the increasing frequency of communication between China and foreign countries, there is a greater need for people to learn English, a lingo franca in today’s world. Nowadays, the communication between China and the rest part of the world has changed from daily communication using common English to more academic exchanges via the medium of English for special purposes (ESP). However, domestic English teaching from primary school, junior high school to university is mainly general purpose English teaching. CET-4 and CET-6 are also proficiency tests for general purposes. College English teaching is not linked with ESP, resulting in students’ inability to be qualified for ESP posts after graduation. In this trend, the current domestic English teaching mode based on general purpose English can no longer satisfy the needs of the English learning public. ESP teaching is poised to receive increasing attention from the language teaching and research community and thrive in the future.

English for legal purposes is a branch of English for special purposes (ESP), which is developed to meet learners’ specific English learning objectives and communication needs. Nowadays, it is of great importance to study and apply legislation, for it is the basic national policy to promote the rule of law and build China under the rule of law in an all-round way. Legal English learning is instrumental in improving the Chinese public’s legal literacy.

However, such a variety of English is very professional and difficult to learn, as it contains many technical terms related to laws and regulations, rights and obligations, as well as a great deal of archaic English vocabulary, loan words from Latin, French and other foreign tongues. Most of the sentences of legal English are long and involved, posing great challenges to Chinese learners of English. There are also many fixed usages which are difficult for ordinary people to understand. Therefore, the traditional teaching mode has been unable to be applied to legal English learning in an effective way.

1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study

The main purpose of this study is to verify the effectiveness of the approach in legal English learning. This paper establishes a chunk list of high frequency legal English terms. An empirical study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of chunk lists in improving students’ legal English vocabulary and reading ability. Then the author verifies the effectiveness of the application of the approach to legal English learning. 

As an efficient language learning method, lexical approach has been fully tested in English teaching practice for a long time. Applying this approach to legal English learning will possibly reduce the difficulty of legal English learning and provide an efficient and reliable learning method for legal English learning. 

1.3 Layout of the Thesis

This paper consists of five chapters.

Chapter One introduces the background of the study and the significance and purpose of this paper. It also touches on the main contents of the whole article.

Chapter Two discusses the essential theories of which the research draws on in the thesis. It provides the definitions of lexical chunks and legal English. In addition, it reviews the former researches about lexical chunks and legal English at home and abroad.

Chapter Three illustrates the research process in detail, including research questions, participants, instruments, data analysis and a discussion, etc. It particularly describes the whole process and results of experiment and carries out an analysis of and offers an explanation about the data.

Chapter Four conducts discussions based on the results of the experiment and questionnaires. Through these discussions, the author verifies the effectiveness of lexical approach in improving vocabulary and reading competence in legal English. Furthermore, it verifies the effectiveness of the lexical approach in legal English learning.

Chapter Five is the conclusion part. It summarizes what this research has finished. In addition, it points out the limitations existing in the research and makes suggestions to later researchers.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Definition of Lexical Chunks

Basically, lexical chunks refer to the collocation of words. It is a language phenomenon that occurs more frequently than a single word in real communication, and its form is relatively stable. Generally speaking, lexical chunks include idioms, collocations, phrases and so on. Chunks not only include continuous phrase structures like “in the end”. They also include discontinuous sentence frames, such as “not only... but also”, and complete sentences, such as “How do you do?” Cruse (2004) defined it as “ family of words that are habitually used together.” The words in the series are associated with each other and co-occur more frequently than accidentally. In short, a lexical chunk is a group of words that are commonly found together, which includes collocations but these usually just involve content words, not functional words.

2.2 Definition of legal English

Legal English refers to the expression of legal science concepts and litigation or non-litigation legal affairs used in the language or part of a language. In short, it is a specialized variety (or occupational register) of the English language used by law-related professionals like lawyers and in legal documents. Legal English includes distinctive words, meanings, phrases, modes of expression, and so on.

2.3 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Lexical Chunks in English Learning

The lexical approach has gained in popularity among scholars both at home and abroad. In many a college and university, the lexical approach has been applied to teaching, including listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation with visible effects. There are a lot of researchers focusing on legal English teaching research. They have made efforts to explore lexical characteristics and learning methods of legal English. In the field of lexical approach, Becker (1975) firstly proposed the concept of prefabricated chunks in 1970s. He argued that it was a collection of functions and forms, with the features of vocabulary and grammar. Lewis (1993) called this kind of lexical combination “Lexical Chunk”. He argued that language was mostly composed of multi-word and prefabricated chunks rather than conventional vocabulary and grammar. His work, The Lexical Approach, had established the theoretic basics of chunk teaching. Wray (2002) originally defined lexical chunks as “sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved as a whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar.”

Most Chinese scholars started the study of lexical chunks since the beginning of this century. Initially, Chinese researchers did not have a clear acknowledge of lexical chunk’s translation and definition. Opinions fail to be unified. Ma (2011) made analyses and conducted discussions about classification, definition and recognition of lexical chunks from the perspective of theory and practice. He thought researchers should engage in comprehensive research from the aforementioned two aspects in lexical chunk research and exploration. A scientific theoretical system for a description of lexical chunk should be initially constructed and multidisciplinary interpretation should be simultaneously carried out from professional perspectives, including cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, neurolinguistics etc. Then scholars should extract universal or specialized lexical chunk lists in the second language for teaching and research from the corpus with a multi-verification method. Wang and Sun (2018) gave further explanations for lexical chunk extracting based on the corpus. They comprehensively illustrated the tools, methods and application fields of their research findings. Their research provided scientific reference for lexical chunk and its extracting.

2.4 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Lexical Chunks in Legal English Learning

There are foreign scholars who performed researches into learning methods of legal English. Jason Skier and Jutarat Vibulphol (2016) systemically explained the development and application of legal English corpus and highlighted the method of legal English chunk extracting based on Antconc. Codruta Badea (2018) discussed the communication skills in legal English learning. He believed that legal English learners could be helped to improve the accuracy and frequency of legal English through enhancing communication skills.

He (2006) analyzed the methods of legal English learning and gave suggestions from three aspects: comprehending legal background, considering legal questions with the perspective of English and grasping the language features of legal English. Li (2011) stated that modular teaching could be applied to legal English learning. He proposed that legal English could be generally divided into three modules: a legal terminology module, a text study module and a case reading comprehension module. He thought learners could advance in a regular order in the process of legal English learning through these modules. Wang (2015) discussed the design and potential application of legal English corpus. She stated that researchers could use corpus retrieval and statistics software to extract a core vocabulary of high frequency legal English phrases and collocations so that it could provide effective a hierarchical vocabulary outline for legal English teaching.

Plenty of researches at home and abroad have confirmed the effectiveness of the lexical approach and explored the efficient methods of legal English learning. Nevertheless, it seems that nobody has yet applied the lexical approach to legal English learning research. This paper aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of lexical approach when it applies to legal English learning and thereby make pragmatic suggestions from the perspective of language acquisition.

Chapter Three Research design

3.1 Research Questions

The following research questions are raised to set a clear research orientation:

1. L1. Is the lexical approach effective to improve students’ vocabulary of legal English?

2. Is the lexical approach effective to improve students’ reading competence of legal English?

3. Is the lexical theory effective to legal English learning?

3.2 Participants

In this study, 50 college students with a legal knowledge background are selected as subjects, including undergraduate students studying law and students preparing for the Master of Laws examination. On the one hand, because of the strong specialization and difficulty of legal English, it is difficult for students who do not have the background of legal knowledge to study it in a short period of time. On the other hand, law students have a high demand for legal English learning, which can better ensure the enthusiasm and participation of the subjects so as to improve the credibility of the experiment. In addition, in order to ensure that these students’ initial vocabulary and reading competence generally at the same level, all the students that this research selects earned a score of 600 and beyond in CET-4.

3.3 Instruments

3.3.1 Experiment

3.3.1.1 Construction of a chunk list of high-frequency legal English terminology 

(1) Establishment of the Corpus of Legal English Original Textbooks

Based on the survey of students’ needs and due to the heavy workload of establishing a corpus, this study mainly selects two textbooks as the corpus data, namely, the Certificate of Legal English (LEC) National Examination Designated Book (Yang, 2005) and Selected Readings of Legal English Newspapers and Periodicals(Wang, 2009) published by Nanjing University Press, with about 2.5 million words as the corpus data.

Because Antconc can only recognize plain text TXT files, it is necessary to scan all textbooks into an electronic version. Then it is important to clean and organize the text as well as delete pictures and useless words. Next, this author unifies them into a plain text format in order to encode and mark them at the same time. After the above work is done, the original corpus of legal English textbooks is finished.

(2) Construction of a chunk list of high-frequency legal English terminology (CLHLET) 

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