Formulaic Sequences in Mainland China over the Past Decade – A Review

In this paper, Formulaic Sequences (FS) over the past ten years are reviewed to provide some insights on its usage in the process of teaching and learning English language in China. It identifies three main features. Firstly, the general trends of FS, Secondly, the characteristics of development of FS in various fields. Thirdly, the use of FS and the teaching of FS. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions on the use of formulaic sequence on teaching and learning foreign language in mainland China．

Formulaic Sequence Acquisition in Academic Writing: Examining Different Interventions

For L2 learners, successful acquisition of formulaic sequences (FSs) is recognised as being valuable for academic writing. Studies suggest that cued output exercises requiring an evaluation effort may prove beneficial. The aim of this study was to examine the value of such exercises. Four classes in a Japanese university EAP programme were each assigned a different intervention over a 4-week period. Each intervention required a different degree of involvement with selected target FSs. Writing samples collected from participants before the intervention established no significant difference in target FS use between the groups. Postintervention data, drawn from the difference in individual participant’s pre- and posttest target FS use, revealed significantly increased use only from the group assigned exercises requiring the greatest involvement, suggesting that such exercises may be important for acquisition. These findings are discussed in relation to other studies concerning cued output and evaluation effort. 第二言語学習者のアカデミック・ライティング学習には、定型表現の習得が有益とされる。判断負荷のかかる手がかり提示型課題の効果を示唆した研究もある。そこで本研究は、そうした練習課題の有効性を検証するため、日本の大学のEAPコースで4週間にわたり、4つの通常授業クラスで各々異なる介入活動を行なった。各介入は、特定の定型表現に対し異なる度合いの関与を必用とした。介入前の授業参加者によるライティング・サンプルにおいては、グループ間の有意差は認められなかったが、介入後のデータでは、一つのグループでのみ、定型表現の使用に大幅な増加が認められた。ここからは、このグループの参加者が行なった練習問題に、より多くの判断作業量が含まれていたことが、定型表現の習得のために重要であった、という可能性が示唆される。こうした調査結果について、手がかり提示型課題と判断作業の問題を扱った他の研究との関係から、考察を行なった。

Is All Formulaic Language Created Equal? Unpacking the Processing Advantage for Different Types of Formulaic Sequences

Research into recurrent, highly conventionalized “formulaic” sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to “novel” (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases—idioms, binomials, and collocations—and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity, and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly.

Investigating effects of criterial consistency, the diversity dimension, and threshold variation in formulaic language research

O’Donnell et al. (2013) considered four measures of formulaicity and reported that they produced different results concerning the effects of expertise and first/second language status on formulaic sequence usage in academic writing. The current study explores several additional methodological issues using the same dataset from O’Donnell et al. (2013). We first motivate the need for criterial consistency and investigate whether frequency- and association-based measures yield different results when they are both obtained using corpus-internal criteria. The informativeness of the diversity dimension of formulaic sequence use is then gauged by comparing the results of phrase-frame type-token ratio against those of other measures. Finally, we profile formulaic sequence distribution across quartiles of different measures to assess the effect of variable measure thresholds. Our findings highlight the criticality of issues of criterial consistency, formulaic sequence diversity, and threshold variation in formulaic language research.

An Empirical Study on the Effects of Computer-Corpus-based Formulaic Sequences on College Students’ Oral English Learning

As a kind of stylized language expression, formulaic sequences are widely used in different spoken language contexts, but the study of English formulaic sequences has always been a difficulty in college students’ oral English learning in China. This paper adopts the computer corpus approach and utilizes its massive storage of formulaic sequences and high-speed data retrieval capabilities to help learners with English formulaic sequence learning. On one hand, learners are able to truly and objectively understand the use of formulaic sequences in English-speaking environment through the computer corpus; on the other hand, learners can improve their memories and increase their formulaic sequence learning efficiency with the help of the structured and regularized and massive amount of use cases of formulaic sequences retrieved by the computer corpus. Finally, in the empirical study, through the comparative analysis of the test group and the control group, this paper proves that the computer-corpus-based formulaic sequences have great significance to oral English teaching.

FORMULAIC SEQUENCE(FS) CANNOT BE AN UMBRELLA TERM IN SLA

The termformulaic sequence(FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of the article provides a conceptual framework focusing on the contrast between linguistic or learner-external definitions, that is, what is formulaic in the language the learner is exposed to, such as idiomatic expressions or collocations, and psycholinguistic or learner-internal definitions, that is, what is formulaic within an individual learner because it presents a processing advantage. The second part focuses on the methodological consequences of adopting a learner-internal approach to the investigation of FSs, and examines the challenges presented by the identification of psycholinguistic formulaicity in advanced L2 learners, proposing a tool kit based on a hierarchical identification method.