The Effect Of Task Types On The Acquisition Of L2 Formulaic Sequences

It has been proved that formulaic sequences are so popular in English utterances that they could help to define a native English speaker from a group of non-native speakers.The usage-based studies of lexical acquisition have put more and more emphasis on the study of the lexico-semantic features and the processing mechanism of formulaic sequences.Enlightened by the two hypotheses,namely the comprehensible output hypothesis(Swain,1985)and the involvement load hypothesis(Laufer &Hultijn,2001),this thesis has investigated the influence of tasks inducing different involvement loads in the process of formulaic sequence acquisition.To be more specific,this thesis has answered the following three questions: whether different task types result in different retention effects;whether different task types lead to different levels of lexical knowledge;whether different task types affect the acquisition of two different kinds of formulaic sequences.The empirical study mainly consists of a pilot study,a task-based experiment and post-tests.All participants(160 sophomore students)come from four classes in Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics.One class took part in the pilot study,through which,the target formulaic sequences were chosen and the time allocation of each part of the experiment was decided.The other three classes were three experiment groups.They were assigned to three different tasks according to their involvement loads(blank-filling task,English-Chinese translation task,sentence-making task)after being taught the formulaic sequences in lexical approach.The first task induces the lowest involvement loads and the latter two have higher but the same involvement loads.All participants were given a post-test immediately after they finished the tasks and another post-test two weeks later.The scores of the two tests were submitted to SPSS17.0 for analysis.To better interpret the results,three students from each experimentgroup were selected for a short interview after the delayed post-test.After analyzing the scores of the tasks,the following results have been obtained.First,the involvement loads of tasks exert significant influence on the retention of formulaic sequences.Tasks with higher involvement loads lead to better retention effects of formulaic sequences and tasks inducing the same involvement loads have similar influences on the retention of formulaic sequences.Second,the results in both post-tests show that tasks with higher involvement loads bring more benefits to the use of formulaic sequences.In the immediate study,tasks inducing the same involvement loads have similar performance in using formulaic sequences;however in the delayed post-test,they have different effects – the sentence-making task,which requires a deeper level of processing outperforms the E-C translation task.Third,tasks with different involvement loads produce a significant effect on the acquisition of both fixed and semi-fixed formulaic sequences.Fixed formulaic sequences got higher scores in both post-tests than semi-fixed ones;however there is no interactive effect between the involvement load and the type of formulaic sequences.The findings of this study have both theoretical and pedagogical significance.Theoretically,this study has,to some extent,proved that the involvement loads exert great influences on L2 formulaic sequence acquisition and tasks requiring a deeper level of processing bring more benefits to learners' acquisition of formulaic sequences.Pedagogically,this study has offered enlightening suggestions for language teachers and learners to design and do effective practices of formulaic sequences.Fulfilling tasks,which induce higher involvement loads and require a deeper level of processing,will bring more benefits to the formulaic sequence acquisition.In addition,teachers and learners should pay special attention to the learning of semi-fixed formulaic sequences,which involves greater difficulties than learning fixed formulaic sequences.