The Use Of Formulaic Sequences In Chinese College English Majors' Spoken English: A Corpus-based Study

In recent years,the study of formulaic sequences enjoys a growing popularity with scholars.It has proven that formulaic sequences exert great influence in language acquisition.The present study utilizes a corpus-based approach with the purpose of investigating the difference in the use of formulaic sequences between Chinese English major students and native speakers.2-word to 6-word sequences are extracted from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SECCL)and the native corpus Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(MICASE)is used for reference.Based on Nattinger and Decarrico's(1992)structural taxonomy,those extracted formulaic sequences are classified into four categories: polywords,institutionalized expressions,phrasal constraints and sentence builders.The distribution of these four types of formulaic sequences used by Chinese students and native speakers is compared.Then,following Biber et al.'s(2003)functional classification,three primary categories of formulaic sequences are compared and analyzed,that is,stance expressions,discourse organizing sequences and referential sequences.The results show that 1)Wherever in SECCL or MICASE,the number of FSs decline with the words increasing but Chinese college English majors' use of 2-word sequences to 6-word sequences all outnumbers that of native speakers;2)There is a big difference in the use of phrasal constraints,sentence builders and institutionalized expressions between the two corpora and the distribution proportion of polywords is more or less the same;3)Chinese college English majors have acquired plenty of formulaic sequences,but there exists overused,underused and misused formulaic sequences in their oral English compare to native counterparts.Possible causes of the differences are discussed in terms of the mother tongue interference,strategic competence,lack of L2 input and test environment.