| Volumes of researches at home and abroad(Wray,2013;He Weiwei,2013)suggest that considerable formulaic expressions are produced in everyday life in the form of fixed or semi-fixed chunks(Liu Li,2013).This kind of phenomenon is called formulaic language(Wood,2010,2015).With the gradual development of linguistics since the 1970s(Wood,2010),studies on formulaic language are getting more and more prosperous and fruitful results have been known ever since.Among the researches,what nearly all of researches agree with each other is that formulaic language possesses a unique function in communication.Meantime,problems seem coexisting together.Firstly,there has been,so far,no agreed definition(Wray,2002,2008,2012)for formulaic language;secondly,criteria to identify it could not satisfy all of the researches;then,these two reasons,directly or indirectly,suggest that there need further researches in the area.In China it is amazing that there is a trend(Zhan Suxian and Ai Dan,2015)to investigate the way of teaching formulaic language in improving students' English listening,speaking and writing.The application of it in foreign language education,especially secondary level of education,is not satisfying.Viewing this situation,the writer of this dissertation makes an attempt to carry out a research of senior high school students' writing,aiming to explore the following two questions.(1)Does formulaic language instruction influence the senior high school students' English writing performance?(2)Which aspects of the senior high school students' writing are influenced by formulaic language instruction?The above two questions are further explored with Hayes' s(1996)writing mode(Weight,2002),the PEEP attribute writing scales(Weight,2002)and lexical approach(Lewis,1993).The whole pedagogical research falls into two stages which are to beimproved continuously in operation.One is the preparation stage,during which teaching materials are collected and selected by the writer with the formulaic language items for the later teaching.The other stage is the formal instruction stage which consists of pre-writing,while-writing and post-writing.Data collection in the first stage includes test scores of pretest.The test is organized and graded by the local education bureau.The data collected in the second stage is accomplished by means of interviews and a corpus tool.They are both about participants' views on formulaic language use.The present research,lasting 32 teaching periods,finally finds that most of the participants are positively influenced by such a kind of instruction except for the top and low level of students.After the instruction,such positive influence is further proved in the interviews.The main effect refers to language fluency and convenience in writing process.Corpus tool,BFSU PowerConc 1.0 beta 21C(Xu Jiajing,Liang Maocheng and Li Wenzhong,2011)is employed to check the truth of the comments from the interview by transferring students' writing from answer sheet into electronic text.It turns out that after instruction,learners tend to employ some fixed or semi-fixed n-grams to organize ideas in writing.The top 25 frequently used formulaic language items are listed.However,the weakness of this dissertation cannot be ignored even if there are some results in this thesis.The study first lacks sufficient samples of participants and their writing texts to be analyzed,and then,the value of n-gram is at low value.In the second place,materials used in the preparation stage are still worth discussing.For the weakness of the research,the writer provides suggestions and considerations in this area such as reasonable samples,learners' actual thinking in the writing process,and psycho-linguistic perspective for the influence of future pedagogical formulaic instruction on learners' English writing.Apparently,if a more comprehensive research and more considerations had been invested in this study,a more convincingresult would have been yielded to guide instruction and improve students' writing performance. |
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