Four-vector Formulaic Sequence Approach In EFL Teaching

With the development of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, formulaic language has aroused a keen interest among many linguists such as Nattinger & DeCarrico, Pawley & Syder, Skehan, Wray, Lewis, and so on. Some recent researches even indicate the linguistic phenomenon of formulaic sequences is at the very center of language. The use of formulaic sequences may help learners save efforts in processing, both in reception and in production, and facilitate fluency in spoken and written language.Widdowson defines competence as one's knowledge of language and ability to use it."Knowledge can be characterized in terms of degrees of analyzability, ability can be characterized in terms of degrees of accessibility (Widdowson, 1989:132)". In this framework, grammatical competence is the learner's knowledge of lexicon and grammatical rules. It includes the knowledge of formulaic language and the knowledge of how to generate sentences by syntactic rules. Pragmatic competence accounts for the learner's ability to access formulaic sequences ready for use in appropriate contexts.Owing to the importance of formulaic sequences in language learning, a questionnaire has been made to investigate the status quo of Chinese higher vocational college students in vocabulary learning. It is found that they have paid inadequate attention to formulaic sequences and to the memory of formulaicity purposefully. When learning a word, they mainly adopt the method of learning its form and function. They pay more attention to the word itself, rather than the collocations or sentence patterns. They think they are unable to communicate fluently. They mainly attribute this to small vocabulary.A"four-vector"formulaic sequence approach is put forward. Four vectors include vocabulary association (VA), formulaic absorption (FA), contextual awareness (CA), and grammatical assistance (GA). This thesis is mainly to verify the relationship between the four-vector formulaic sequence approach and English learning through an experiment study and tries to make some new contributions to English teaching.The present study addresses the research question"Can this four-vector formulaic sequence approach improve Chinese learner's English proficiency?"and the sub-question"Can this approach improve Chinese learner's listening, speaking, reading and writing skills?".The four-vector formulaic sequence approach has been applied to higher vocational college students in Chengdu College. Four normal-sized classes, which were freshmen in Department of Computer Science and Department of Economy and Management, were divided into a control group and an experiment group. The experiment lasted from February to June, a semester. In the middle of and at the end of semester, the subjects took several exams. The data were collected according to their performance in exams.It is proven by the experiment that there is high correlation between this approach and the improvement of student's listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities as well as student's English proficiency. Therefore, it is recommended in this thesis that students should raise their awareness of the importance of formulaic sequences and often memorize formulaic sequences in English learning. What's more, the study suggests that teachers should improve their teaching ideas, penetrate the four vectors throughout a whole class, and place formulaic sequences at the center of the whole class teaching. In all, this four-vector formulaic sequence approach is quite promising for further research in language teaching.