A Study Of The Correlation Between Formulaic Sequence And The Oral English Fluency Of Grade Three Students In Senior Middle School

Second language (L2) oral fluency is regarded as one of the significant goals for second language acquisition (SLA), and an important index of the overall language proficiency. While, with the further development of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, the study of formulaic sequence has attracted more and more attention of the field of SLA, this new perspective of formulaic sequences promotes studies on L2 oral fluency. Formulaic sequence, a multi-word unit with lexical and grammatical features, has determinate meaning and relatively identifiable structure. The study on the relationship between formulaic sequence and L2 oral fluency still remains greater vacancy to be filled in contrast with such areas as reading, writing and vocabulary learning. Thus, based on the Levelt’s (1989) Model of Speech Production, this empirical research adopts qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore the correlation between formulaic sequence and the oral English fluency of Grade Three Students in Senior Middle School (GTSs in this thesis).The thesis adopts structural oriented classification proposed by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) (polywords, institutionalized expressions, phrasal constraints and sentence builders). The use of formulaic sequence is assessed by standard frequency of using chunks (SFUC). Commonly-used indices for assessing oral fluency are the temporal indices employed by Towell et al. (1996). Therefore, these temporal indices (i.e. oral fluency indices in this thesis) are used to assess oral English fluency in this thesis (speech rate (SR), phonation/time ratio (PTR), average length of pause (ALP), articulation rate (AR) and mean length of speech run (MLR)).32 GTSs of Jiangling Senior Middle School were the subjects and the oral production of their tests were recorded, collected and then transcribed as samples. Data got form the tests are used to answer the following questions and verify the hypothesis:The use of formulaic sequence presents positive correlation with the oral English fluency of GTSs.1) Whether is there any difference in the distribution of the use of four categories of formulaic sequences among the subjects?2) To what extent is the use of different categories of formulaic sequences correlated with oral English fluency among the subjects?3) Whether is there any correlation between the use of formulaic sequences and oral English fluency among the subjects? If so, to what extent?The main procedures are as follows:1) The quantity of formulaic sequences and syllables were counted. And then, the number of words in every sample was counted with the help of Antconc 3.2.0.2) The wave documents of the subjects’oral production were analyzed through Cool Edit Pro 2.1. The values of the duration of the oral production, pausing frequency and length of pauses were counted.3) With the set formulas the author calculated the values of four categories of formulaic sequences’SFUC, total formulaic sequence’SFUC and five oral fluency indices. Through the SPSS 19.0, the descriptive statistical analysis on the distribution of four categories of formulaic sequences, the Pearson correlation analysis between the. four categories of formulaic sequences and five indices, and the Pearson correlation analysis between SFUC and five indices were carried out successively.Based on the data and analyses above, the following research results are drawn:1) Phrasal constraints are the most frequently used of the four categories of English formulaic sequences among subjects, followed by polywords and sentence builders, and institutionalized expressions are in the lowest frequency of use.2) In terms of the correlation between four categories of formulaic sequences and oral English fluency, phrasal constraint presents significant correlation, polywords and sentence builder have less significant correlation and institutionalized expression has no significant correlation with the five indices of oral English fluency.3) The total use of formulaic sequences presents a positive strong correlation with PTR, followed by SR, MLR and AR. It presents a negative correlation with ALP.In the research, the final score of oral English fluency for each sample was calculated through transforming the raw scores into the standard score. The correlation analysis between the final standard score of oral English fluency and SFUC was carried out and the results presents that the more formulaic sequences they use while making oral productions, the more fluent their oral productions will be.The thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction, where the background, purpose, significance, research approach and thesis structure are described. Chapter Two is literature review on related studies on formulaic sequences and L2 oral fluency at home and abroad. Chapter Three presents the fundamental knowledge of formulaic sequences and L2 oral fluency. Chapter Four is the analysis of research design. Chapter Five is the research results and discussions. Chapter Six includes summary, contributions and limitations of the study and suggestions of future researches.