The Incidental Acquisition Of Formulaic Sequence Through Reading

Recently,the study of formulaic sequence(FS)has increasingly attracted widespread attention of researchers.Starting from two perspectives of theoretical level and practical level,they have done various research on concept defining and pedagogical practice.Besides,the corpus-based study is gaining more attention.However,the study of incidental acquisition of formulaic sequence is slightly weak,especially the formulaic sequences incidental acquisition under natural reading.On the basis of previous research,this study conducts a two-month experiment with two groups of subjects using different genres of reading materials,thus examining the effects of different genres of input materials and different ways of classifying formulaic sequences on the incidental acquisition of formulaic sequences.This study seeks to answer the following two questions:1.Do different genres affect the incidental acquisition of FSs?2.Are there incidental acquisition differences in FSs under different categories?The subjects were 39 second year English major students from two classes of a university in Hubei province.There was no significant difference in their English proficiency.The reading experiment lasted for 8 weeks and subjects were asked to complete given topic materials every two weeks(one class reads novel text and the other reads news respectively).After finishing the two-week reading task,subjects needed to write an essay related to the reading topic.At last,they accepted the classroom writing tests.The research findings are as follows: 1)there is no significant difference in incidental acquisition of formulaic sequences with different genres inputs,but descriptive statistics results show that subjects from novel group perform better than news group;2)there are significant differences in the incidental acquisition of formulaic sequences within some categories,and formulaic sequences of NP/PP-based and phrasal constraints are used more frequently than other categories.The findings of our study have certain reference value and significance for foreign language learning and teaching.Firstly,in the teaching of natural reading,long-term and continuous reading activities should be guaranteed as far as possible,so as to obtain better incidental acquisition results.At the same time,in the selection of reading articles,priority should be given more to the literary text,because the experimental results prove that the incidental acquisition effect on the formulaic sequence in literary novels is better.And then,in the process of reading,teachers can take some incentive measures to encourage students to keep a reading habit so as to achieve better acquisition effect.At last,teachers can give priority to meaning-based extraction method if they want to examine students’ FSs mastery,and use frequency-based way as an auxiliary.