Role Of Dictionary Use In The Production And Retention Of Formulaic Sequences In SLA

Formulaic sequences are widespread in language. It has been found that formulaic sequences contribute to the accuracy and fluency of a native speaker’s utterances. And for second language learners, they must have knowledge and mastery of these sequences at some level if they want to be close to the fluency and accuracy of native speakers in language production. However, it is not an easy job for foreign language learners of English to master the knowledge of formulaic sequences. Therefore, The present study was carried out with the aim of exploring the role of dictionary use in the production and retention of formulaic sequences in second language learning. Since word-lists are ubiquitous in English textbooks, one of such lists was used for the purpose of comparison.Subjects in this study were 80 senior high school students in a middle school in Jiangxi Province. Three tests were done one by one in the experiment.Major findings of the present study are summarized as follows:Firstly, the word-list group did significantly better than the dictionary group in reading comprehension. That is to say, there doesn’t exist a close correlation between dictionary use in searching formulaic sequences and reading comprehension. Two factors may account for this. One is that students in the dictionary group encountered a lot of difficulties in looking up the formulaic sequences in the dictionaries which would influence their performance in the reading comprehension. The other is that the act of looking up the dictionaries disturbed the students’ understanding of the context.Secondly, both of the two groups scored low in the production test. It confirmed the hypothesis that learners encounter a lot of difficulties in learning the productive vocabulary knowledge. Nevertheless, the mean score for the dictionary group was significantly higher than the word-list group. Our findings showed that more elaborate mental processing results in better retention.Thirdly, in the retention test, the mean scores for the two groups were almost equal. However, considering that a lot of formulaic sequences had not been found by the dictionary group, we could still speculate that dictionary use had a positive effect in the retention of formulaic sequences.By the way, in order to find out the performance of students’ dictionary consulting, a questionnaire was administered to the treatment group. Interestingly, we found that a lot of students could not find out the formulaic sequences in the dictionary even though they were included there. Psychological, technical, subjective, objective factors may be accounted for this.Research findings of the present study shed some light on EFL formulaic sequences’teaching, learning, and researching.