A Study On The Influence Of Language Proficiency And Word Frequency On The Mental Lexicon Representation Of Formulaic Sequences In Chinese English Learners

Formulaic sequence, also called lexical chunks, is referred to as a string of words as prefabricated chunks with lexical and grammatical characteristics stored as a whole in the brain which can be changed partly or holistically and retrieved by speakers. Investigations have found that formulaic sequences could improve the language fluency, authenticity, and stimulate learners’ interest in language learning, so the acquisition and use of formulaic sequences becomes a big barrier and bottleneck of the improvement of language capacity. More and more scholars at home and abroad begin to focus their interests on the study of formulaic sequences. But few studies focused on L2 formulaic sequences in China, most of which focused on the English native speakers, and few focused on Chinese English learners.The aim of the present study is to investigate whether Chinese English learners’ frequency of formulaic sequences and language proficiency influence the mental representation of formulaic sequences. 60 students from one university of Suzhou participated the study, 30 freshmen of English majors as low proficiency group, and the other 30 first-year postgraduate students of English majors as high proficiency group. All the subjects were required to complete two tasks. The first one was a gap-filling task about 24 formulaic sequences with the word of, which were embedded in 24 utterances as test items. Subjects needed to fill in the blank to tell the most appropriate formulaic sequence they thought. The second one was a frequency checking task about the same 24 formulaic sequences. The subjects were asked to select the frequency among four frequency categories: low frequency, middle-low frequency, middle-high frequency and high frequency. Here are the research questions of the present study:1. Does the L2 proficiency of the Chinese FEL learners affect their mental representation of formulaic sequences? If yes, what are the differences of the mental representation of formulaic sequences between the Chinese FEL learners at differentEnglish proficiency levels?2. Does the frequency of formulaic sequences affect the Chinese FEL learners’ mental representation of formulaic sequences? If yes, to what extent?The major findings of the present study are as follows:Firstly, Language proficiency affects the mental representation of formulaic sequences in Chinese English learners; we can conclude that the subjects of higher proficiency are more likely to memorize or store the formulaic sequences as single units than subjects of lower proficiency.Secondly, there is a positive correlation between the scores of the gap-filling task and the frequency of use for the formulaic sequences(r=0.378, p=0.003), that is to say, the more frequent the formulaic sequence is, the more likely it is to be stored and processed as a whole in mental lexicon.The findings of the present study are significant for the teaching and acquisition of formulaic sequences. Learning formulaic sequences can improve one’s language proficiency and teachers need to pay more attention to the teaching of formulaic sequences to improve students’ English.