Prefabricated Language And Language Teaching

Prefabricated language, with a variety of labels (formulaic language, ready-made chunks, unanalyzed language, lexical phrases, etc.), interchangeably used in literature, has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years from researchers in both language acquisition and language teaching. The idea of prefabricated language is highlighted through the fact that many "generated strings" - sentences which can be accounted for by the productive rules of syntax and semantics - are actually seldom used by native speakers, while others, "prefabricated" or "lexicalized" chunks, are prevailingly selected by native speakers of a community. Prefabricated language, being an intersection of meaning, structure and function, provides an effective unit for measuring linguistic complexity. It has proved to be a powerful tool during the process of first and second language acquisition and thus an ideal unit in classroom teaching.This paper aims to outline the theoretical framework of prefabricated language, to discuss its crucial role in first and second language acquisition and to draw educational implications for the practice of English Language Teaching.It mainly includes three parts.The first part introduces the basic ideas about prefabricated language by identifying its conceptual boundaries and describing its various features and functions. Although prefabricated language has been given a variety of labels and definitions by researchers, there is explicit agreement on its existence as an important language phenomenon. The definition chosen by the authorbased on Wary (2000:465) is "a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated; that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar." Instead of using strict criteria for identifying what is prefabricated, researchers are more prone to see it on a variability continuum, with completely invariant clusters at one end, freely combining morphemes at the other, and all degrees of combinational flexibility in between, (idioms -collocations - colligations - free combinations)The features and functions of prefabricated language can be understood from four perspectives. Structural approach offers structural criteria to characterize various prefabricated chunks and classify them as polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraints and sentence builders. Functional approach identifies three functions of prefabricated language in communication and they are social interactions, necessary topics and discourse devices. Psycholinguistic approach holds that prefabricated chunks have functions during language production: processing shortcuts, time-buyers and manipulation of information. Neurolinguistic approach points to the fact that prefabricated language is neurolinguistically different from creative language in that it is localized on both sides of the brain, as opposed to just the left hemisphere, and can be preserved in cases of aphasia.The second part tends to explore the important role prefabricated language plays during the process of language acquisition. Many studies show that children pass through a stage in which they use a larger number of unanalyzed chunks of language in certain predictable contexts. Many earlyresearchers thought these prefabricated chunks were distinct and somewhat peripheral to the main body of language, but more recent research puts them at the very center of language acquisition and sees it as basic to the creative rule-forming processes which follow. In first language acquisition, children first attempt to use whole prefabricated utterances in socially appropriate contexts ('item-learning'), and they associate these utterances with functions and build up their grammatical and pragmatic competence out of this form/function composite. In second language acquisition, the learners' language development goes through a process from invariable routines to patterns and from le...