[01] Pengyu Guo, School of Foreign Languages, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China. [02] Sihong Huang, School of Foreign Languages, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.

The importance of teaching motivated lexical chunks has been recognized by second language teachers and researchers and in various fields. However, it remained obscure on how to bring about the motivation of lexical chunks to the learners. In addition to the meaning-based semantic motivation, form-based phonological motivation has been proposed as an option, despite the lack of attention and empirical studies. The present study, taking alliteration as an example, aims to investigate the effect of teaching phonologically motivated lexical chunks to young EFL learners through awareness-raising tasks. The participants are second year junior high school students who are EFL learners and several EFL teachers in the same school. The data analysis yields three major findings: Firstly, alliterative lexical chunks have a stronger mnemonic effect than those that show little or no phonological repetition for Chinese junior high school students in four aspects: immediate recognition, delayed recognition, immediate reproduction and delayed reproduction. Secondly, most Chinese junior high school students failed to spontaneously notice alliteration in lexical chunks, which clearly suggests that even relatively salient patterns may need to be pointed out to help students to notice them. Thirdly, the mnemonic effect of alliteration can be maximized with teacher’s instruction to raise learners’ awareness and to notice it.

Lexical Chunks, Alliteration, Phonological Motivation, Phonological Repetition, Noticing

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