An Investigation into Formulaic Sequences in Advanced EFL Writing

摘要

Accumulating research had pointed out that formulaic sequences serve many important functions in L2 learner's interlinguage development in terms of how language is acquired, processed and used. The mastery of them has become an important indicator of L2 learning success as a whole. Appropriate use of formulaic sequences enables L2 writers, for example, to express technical ideas economically, to signal stages in their discourse and to display the necessary level of formality. Conversely, the absence of such features may result in a student's writing being judged as inadequate. In similar vein, in business writing circle within the framework of ESP genre school, the tenet has lied in researcher's consistent quest for answer to the question "how do members in a particular discourse community write in the way they do?" Moreover, some previous research has shown that L2 writers show little awareness of the speech vs. writing distinction and tend to include speech like features in their writing.Other researchers have also found that L2 writers tend to overuse, underuse,and misuse the formulaic sequences in their writing. The present paper is set out to investigate the knowledge and use of formulaic sequences in advanced EFL writing. It will adopt Wray's definition of formulaic sequences due to its consideration of both linguistic and psycholinguistic criteria. In addition, formulaic sequences in the present study will be operationalized as "idioms, collocations and sentence frames (including connectives)". Authentic samples written by advanced EFL writers in China will be collected by the study for analysis so as to come up with their knowledge and use of formulaic sequences. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used in analyzing the data.