A Study On EFL Learners’ Identification Of Formulaic Sequences In Reading

Formulaic sequences are ubiquitous in language use (Nattinger&De Carrico,1992) and they make up a large proportion of any discourse. And if formulaicsequences are so widespread in English discourse, it follows that proficient Englishlearners must have knowledge and mastery of these sequences at some level. Anumber of scholars claim that this knowledge is extensive, and there existadvantages during the process of dealing with them. Furthermore, many scholarsturn their eyes towards the psychological reality of formulaic sequences, and most ofthem find some processing advantages of formulaic sequences. At present, theempirical studies are conducted from four aspects: Reaction Time, Eye-tracking,Oral Reproduction, and ERP.Following the trend of psycholinguistic approach to FS (formulaic sequences),this thesis is trying to do a further research on the psychological reality of formulaicsequences. The RT (Reaction Time) experiment was conducted and used theself-paced reading task to compare different RT on formulaic and non-formulaicsequences between two English levels learners (freshman and junior student). Theauthor chose60expressions (20binomials, and their reversed and abnormal forms)as target phrases, which make up60sentences. And the60sentences were scrambledand divided into three groups, each group containing20sentences. Each sentencewas divided into five parts and shown one by one on the computer. Moreover, in thisstudy, the E-prime experimental software was used to design experiment and collectthe mean reaction time of each participants, the SPSS17.0was used for dataanalysis.Results of the study reveal that:1) there is a processing advantage of formulaicsequences;2) there is little difference of processing formulaic sequences betweenlearners of two English proficiency levels, which means high level learners are notmore sensitive to FSs;3) frequency, predictability and other individual differencesmay affect the processing speed of FSs.The current study provides both theoretical and pedagogical significances for English learning. The results suggest that we should focus more on raising learners’awareness of FS, encourage learners use more FSs in all kinds of skills.