A Study Of The Effect Of Noticing On Formulaic Sequence Acquisition And Oral Proficiency

Formulaic sequences (FS) are conventionalized fixed expressions, continuous or discontinuous, stored and retrieved wholly from memory at the time of use. They exist so widely in a language that each language learner would encounter a great number of this type of linguistic items in their learning process. This is also true for Chinese second language learners (L2 learners) who learn English. And studies related to the formulaic sequences have revealed the significant role played by the formulaic sequences in the second language acquisition. Therefore, more and more researches have been conducted to explore the approaches to facilitate the acquisition of formulaic sequences by scholars home and abroad.By reviewing some related literature home and abroad, the author has found that most of the studies concern about the general aspects such as the nature, the features, the functions, the classifications of formulaic sequence and the criteria for the identification of formulaic sequence. Although various kinds of factors which may hinder L2 learners’acquisition of formulaic sequences have been catalogued and some general suggestions of instructing formulaic sequences have been mentioned by some scholars, few attempts have been made to propose a systematic and detailed approach to the instruction of formulaic sequences and far fewer empirical studies have been conducted to prove or test the effect of a specific teaching method which aims to facilitate the acquisition of formulaic sequences. Therefore, the current study makes attempts to put forward a noticing-based approach to the instruction of formulaic sequences in the classroom aiming to facilitate the acquisition of FS. In addition, a further study is carried out to explore whether there is a correlation between the acquisition of the formulaic sequence and L2 learner’s oral proficiency.A small-scale experiment was carried out to implement the noticing-based approach in real teaching settings and investigate its effect mainly based on the following three research questions:(1) How much do Chinese L2 learners know about the formulaic sequences? (2) Does the noticing-based approach to the instruction of formulaic sequences really take effects in facilitating L2 learners’ acquisition of formulaic sequences? (3) Does the noticing-based approach to the instruction of formulaic sequences result in improving L2 learners’oral proficiency?In response to the three research questions, the research results reveal that:(1) Most of L2 learners realize the existence of FS and learn it consciously; they also prefer to treat FS as a whole in comprehension and memorization; the input frequency of formulaic sequence plays a part in the acquisition of formulaic sequences; the opaqueness and elusiveness of formulaic sequences’ meaning plays a leading role in hindering the learning process; classroom instruction and teaching tutorials are the main resources of learning FS, but more than half of the participants do not believe they have been provided enough FS input for acquisition. (2) The noticing-based approach does take more positive effects than traditional teaching methods in facilitating formulaic sequences acquisition, especially in the acquisition of the adverbial formulaic sequences. (3) The noticing-based approach to the instruction of formulaic sequences does result in improving L2 learners’ oral proficiency, especially in improving the fluency and accuracy of L2 learners’ oral proficiency. In addition, it shows some effects in enlarging L2 learners’ vocabulary and increasing their average use of formulaic sequences.