| Applied linguists John Hughlings Jackson realized the phenomenon of formulaic sequences(FS)in language in the mid-nineteenth century.In the 1920 s,distinguished linguists Jespersen first put forward “formula”.Since the mid-1970 s,many linguistics such as Nattinger & DeCarrico,Wray,N.Schmitt discussed such problems as the recognition and classification of FS,the reasons for the extensive use of FS in language acquisition,and the role of FS in language development.Since the beginning of the new century,with the construction of large corpus and the development of corpus software,researchers have begun to use corpus to explore the characteristics and rules of language use in different domains or styles,including the study of FS.In recent ten years,people began to study the processing of FS from the perspective of psycholinguistics.Foreign research on the mental processing of FS starts earlier and has achieved fruitful results.However,China is still in the initial stage,and the research on the processing of FS needs to be further discussed and studied.Biber et al.called FS lexical bundles(LB)and made a large number of research on LB in different aspects.These studies mainly focus on the use of LB in academic articles or propositional compositions of native speakers and non-native speakers who are mostly English learners,and the research fields mainly involve education,geography,medicine and politics and so on.However,English teachers' use of LB in classroom teaching and the effect of their use frequency of LB on students' acquisition of LB need to be further studied.This study takes four English teachers as the subjects and the author audio-records their classroom discourse by adopting naturalistic observation in order to explore the features and frequency of LB in teacher's discourse repetition as well as the overall use of LB from the perspective of structure and function.Meanwhile,80 EFL learners are selected to probe into their representation models of LB in their teacher's discourse repetition by employing online grammaticality judgment experiment and self-paced sentence-by-sentence reading experiment.Through the analysis and discussion of the experimental data,some major findings of the study are summarized as follows:1.There are 63 LB satisfying the extraction criteria in all the teachers' discourse corpora.Only 1 LB is used in all the four teachers' discourse repetition(Sit down,please),and there are 25,20,21,27 LB identified in the corpus of T2,T3,T6,T8 respectively.The most frequent one T2,T3,T6,T8 use are respectively “Am I right?”(148 times),“All right”(210times),“just mean”(128 times),“just mean”(171 times).These imply that there are differences in the use of LB across different teachers;2.In terms of structural forms,LB in the four teachers' discourse repetition are mostly institutionalized expressions(23.81%)and sentence builders(65.08%),and the lowest numberof structural forms is phrasal constraints(3.17%);In terms of functional classifications,there are 6 LB within the stance expressions,31 LB for the discourse organizers,25 LB in the special conversational bundles and 1 LB within the referential expressions.The analysis indicates that lexical bundles are a unique linguistic construct.Although lexical bundles are usually not complete grammatical structures nor are they idiomatic,they function as basic building blocks of discourse;3.In online grammaticality judgment experiment,the processing speed of English majors is significantly faster than that of non-English majors(2354ms vs.3781ms),and independent-samples T test shows that the difference is significant(t =-5.819,p =.000).In addition,the error rate of English majors on FS is significantly lower than that of non-English majors(5.55% vs.15.05%),in which independent-samples T test shows that the difference is significant(t =-4.734,p =.000).In self-paced sentence-by-sentence reading experiment,the reading speed of the two classes of English majors of sentence 1 and sentence 2 is faster than that of the two classes of non-English majors,and the difference is significant(t =-9.188,p=.000).The results indicate that non-English majors represent LB in both holistic and analytical forms,while English majors represent LB in the holistic form.Therefore,English teachers should consciously increase the use of FS,cultivate students' sensitivity to FS,and improve students' English proficiency through various teaching activities.Students should consciously accumulate FS to make the produced language more natural and more suitable for specific context and genre,and improve the fluency and accuracy in their language use. |
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