A Study Of The Effects Of Recitation As Input On Vocational Students’ Learning Of Formulaic Sequences

The study is designed to investigate the effects of recitation input on vocational students’ learning of Formulaic sequences. To be specific, it aims to explore the effectiveness of recitation input on learners’ writing proficiency of different levels and the use of formulaic sequences(FSs) on their written production in terms of the accuracy and variation indexes of FSs, as well as the detailed process of FSs’ learning, with the purpose of adding to relevant literature and offering some hints to practical language teaching and learning.The subjects are ninety eight students from two parallel classes in a vocational college in China, majoring in Project Cost. This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods, lasting for one semester. In accordance with the results from the pre-test as well as their English scores of College Entrance Examination, both classes are divided into three levels respectively, i.e. the high-level, the middle-level and the low-level. The software SPSS 20.0 is utilized to examine what effects the recitation input can exert on the students of different levels by conducting independent samples t-tests respectively between the high-levels, the middle-levels and the low-levels of the Experimental class(EC) and the control class(CC). Moreover, this study makes a contrastive analysis of FSs used by both classes in their post-test composition in terms of accuracy and variation. In addition, process logs, interviews and stimulated recalls also serve as main protocols to collect affluent data, aiming at making a further investigation into their attitudes towards recitation method as well as the detailed process of FSs’ learning.The findings indicate that among those in the EC, the upper and intermediate students have achieved more significant improvement in their writing proficiency than those in the CC while the low-level ones fail to obtain such achievements. Moreover, the students in the EC have proved to be superior to those in the CC in terms of the accuracy and variation of FSs. By comparing those frequently used FSs in their post-test composition, it was not difficult to find that the students in the EC have made fewer mistakes than those in the CC. In addition, it can be concluded that more types of expressions emerge in the composition of the EC to present the same meaning. It is also found that the students can master a number of FSs through the recitation practice, i.e. noticing FSs in reading, summarizing and memorizing FSs in reciting, and using FSs in writing and also both the recitation process and the FSs learning process tend to facilitate each other. In conclusion, recitation input is proved to be conductive to the development of students’ writing proficiency as well as their mastery of FSs.The study is of some significance, offering both theoretical implications for the study of FSs and practical implications for language teaching and learning. However, it suffers from some limitations in that the sample is relatively small, the time span of the study is quite short, and the models of the same difficulty are offered to students of different levels, thus leading the low-level students not to complete the recitation tasks due to incomprehensible input. Further studies can be carried out to make up for these limitations by expending the number of the subjects and the time span or offering them models of different difficulties so as to contribute more to the research on recitation input in vocational English writing.