An Empirical Study On The Effects Of The Use Of Formulaic Sequences On English Majors’ Writing Ability

Significance of formulaic sequences(FSs) has been recognized by an increasing number of language acquisition researchers. The term "formulaic sequences" proposed by Wray(2000) is adopted in the thesis because it can cover other labels referring to the phenomenon of formulacity, such as chunks, lexical phrases, formulaic language, etc. Formulaic sequences in the thesis are defined as multiword or multiform strings which are either entirely fixed or with open slots to fill in; they are prefabricated, stored and retrieved by language learners as a whole rather than being created from individual items with grammatical rules. When it comes to English writing, a great deal of study can prove that the ability of using FSs can help writers improve their proficiency in English writing. So, this study tries to study on the effects of FSs on the Chinese English majors’ writing ability from a corpus-based approach.The learner data employed for this study were extracted from CEW(the Corpus of English Writing). Because most of the compositions in TEM8 are argumentative essays, the objects of the research are argumentative essays. In order to answer the three research questions of the study, these writing samples are analyzed by both manual computation and SPSS software. (1) What are the general characteristics of FSs used by Chinese English majors’in their argumentative writings? (2) What are the differences in the use of FSs between the exam writings(TEM8) and the exercise writings? (3) What are the differences in the use of FSs between the high-score group and the low-score group? Finally, after the result and discussion, are there any types of FSs that can be adequate to use as one predicting indicator to the writing proficiency of learners?The research has found some enlightening and important findings. Firstly, regardless of their proficiency, although the variety is very limited, Chinese English majors in this study are able to use a relatively small number of formulaic sequences. Chinese English majors prefer formulaic sequences at phrase level to formulaic sequences at sentence level, semi-fixed formulaic sequences to fixed formulaic sequences in terms of the distribution of four types of formulaic sequences. And fixed formulaic sequences at sentence level accounts for the lowest while semi-fixed formulaic sequences at phrase level accounts for the highest. Secondly, Chinese English majors perform better in exam writings than in the exercise writings in the use of semi-fixed formulaic sequences in terms of frequency. Thirdly, in terms of frequency, in the use of formulaic sequences, the high-score group performs better than the low-score group. Both at phrase level, the high-score group has a much higher percentage of the use of the fixed formulaic sequences. At last, after the result and discussion, only the fixed formulaic sequences at phrase level of the four types of formulaic sequences have the predicting power to the writing proficiency of learners.In light of the important role of formulaic sequences in writing, it is advisable for teachers as well as the language learners to lay emphasis on the use of FSs. Of course, there exist some limitations in the study. For example, comparatively speaking, the sample size is small as it is very difficult to mark all the formulaic sequences in writings manually. Therefore, further researches based on this study are expected.