Formulaic Sequence Strategies And The Effects On Secondary School Students’ English Writing

English writing has been a major concern in senior English teachingand has drawn the attention of many scholars and teachers for quite along time. The attention in the recent years is paid to discussing whetherEnglish teachers can adopt more effective strategies to bring aboutstudents’ effective written production compared with traditionalteaching methods. Formulaic sequence strategies have gainedpopularity in our L2teaching and learning. The input and output offormulae can lessen the difficulty students have in finishing their writingtasks and can lead to their writing’s accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity.The birth of the thesis mainly arises from few empirical researchesdone about senior high school English writing involving learners’ writtencorpora while many scholars both at home and abroad have doneconsiderable work on the introduction and description of some relevanttheories and some empirical researches on college students and Englishmajors. For the purpose of the study,30senior students who are good atEnglish form a control group (CG) and30senior students who are poorat learning English belong to an experimental group (EG). During thewhole process, the control group was taught with the traditionalteaching method while formulaic sequence strategies were applied tothe experimental group. Before the experiment, the author hadinterviews with her students and colleagues. She also conductedquestionnaire survey among students. In the pre-test and post-test,students in both groups finished their writing tasks under the samecircumstances. Then their compositions based on two selected writingtasks make up learner written corpora. Collected data will be used tomake quail-quanti analyses by adopting some computer software toenhance the study’s reliability and validity.There is evidence that formulaic sequence strategies have positive effects on their compositions. After analysis of self-established learnerwritten corpora by adopting Readability Analyser1.0, SPSS17.0andAntConc.3.2.2w., we can see students in EG have made greaterprogress in words, sentences and n-grams. The results of analysis of threetypical kinds of formulas using SPSS17.0show that polywords, phrasalconstraints and sentence builders in particular also contribute tostudents’ writing. Sample analysis shows an increase in the amount andtypes of formulas and improvement in writing’s fluency and idiomaticity.The findings of the study reveal the good effects of formulaicsequence strategies on learners’English written production. It is obviousthat application of formulaic sequence strategies to English writingteaching has enabled students in EG to bring out more accurate, fluentand idiomatic writing. Therefore, it is vital that English teachers shouldadopt formulaic sequence strategies in the writing process.