On The Correlationship Between The Recognition Of Formulaic Sequences And Comprehension Of Written Discourse

FS (Formulaic Sequences) are widespread in language and have a variety of usages and functions, and therefore play an important role in second language acquisition and language teaching. Studies on FS have gained growing favor at home and abroad. The relationship between FS and reading comprehension remains an unsettled issue and empirical studies in this area are still rare.This study is an attempt to probe into this question by investigating English learners'recognition of FS and their reading comprehension competence. Through the investigation, this present thesis tries to explore the following two questions:(1) To what extent can English learners of Chinese indentify FS? (2) Are the identification of FS and the comprehension of written discourse related to each other?Two groups of students in Shaanxi Normal University are involved in this experiment. One group is non-English major freshmen, and the other group is English major senior students, representing intermediate level English learners and advanced English learners in China respectively. They are firstly required to read four passages selected from CET 4 and answer 20 questions within 35 minuets, and then indentify FS in a given passage.The major findings of this study are:(1) Chinese English learners'performance in identifying FS is far from satisfaction. (2) The recognition of FS and reading comprehension are positively and significantly correlated to each other. Through observation, one more question was put forward, that is the implicitness and explicitness of FS. It can be inferred from the experiment that FS are implicit knowledge in the early stage and could be transformed into explicit knowledge later on, which can be improved by explicit teaching.This thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter and the last chapter are introduction and conclusion respectively. The second chapter presents a review of the literature on the previous major studies of FS, including its definition, identification, classification, study methodologies, and its studies home and abroad. The third chapter serves as a theoretical pavement for this thesis by formulating the functions of FS in facilitating reading comprehension. Chapter four is the experiment of correlative study of the identification of FS and the comprehension of written discourse. Chapter five analyzes the data collected in the experiment and has a discussion about the results. Meanwhile, a new question on the implicitness and explicitness was discussed. In addition, some pedagogical implications and suggestions are provided.