A Study On Formulaic Language And EFL Writing Efficiency Performance

Formulaic language in language learning plays a pivotal role. In the past, linguists and language learners believed that language learning should be guided by the rules. Therefore, the role of grammar in language output was over-emphasized. But in the last two decades, the researches on language chunks in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics had shown a high level of interest in formulaic language. Being composed by a number of words and stored as a whole in the brain, formulaic language can express the meaning of a whole. In the process of language construction, they function not as a rule but as an example. For this special class of linguistic units, some linguists, such as Alison Wray (2002). who called formulaic language.Formulaic language is often seen as a separate language unit, once learned and understood in advance after being stored in the brain, it can be directly applied in the language. It plays a very important role in saving processing effort, improving language fluency. and enhancing the native-like output, etc. In the early linguistic studies, scholars tended to feel that formulaic language was negligible when discussing the core of language. So formulaic language was seen as an exception in the rule-based language learning. But in the last two decades, researchers have actually tended to focus on the exemplar-based language learning. They think that learning formulaic language is the construction of exemplars, and formulaic language plays a significant role in the creative use of language (Nattinger and DeCarrico.1992).The current research combines quantitative and qualitative analysis trying to prove that formulaic language plays an important role in displaying and elevating writing efficiency.100 sophomore non-English major students were the participants of the study and their compositions of CET-4 were the objective of the study. The researchers created a CET-4 like testing environment and collected their compositions finished within the required period of time. The formulaic language appearing in the compositions were filtered and sorted and then went through the scientific calculation. The purpose was firstly to know the proportion of formulaic language used in the compositions. Then, the researcher grouped different types of formulaic language in accordance with the composition scores (high, medium and low) so as to observe the contribution of them to composition scores. Finally, the questionnaire results were used to compare the learners'objective use and subjective awareness of formulaic language, which further explained the differences, and displayed the significance and restrictions of formulaic language in writing test.Through statistical analysis, the results show that formulaic language occupies a large proportion in test compositions, and the higher the learner's writing ability, the more the use of formulaic language. However, contribution of four types of formulaic language to the writing score varies. The contribution of sentence builders is most evident, ploywords and the phrasal constraints are less contributive, followed by the institutionalized expressions which is almost irrelevant to the composition scores.The structural and functional restrictions are the major factors that cause the difference. Firstly, sentence builders are open in form and bear more grammatical and discourse features so that they play a significant role in displaying learner's writing ability. Thus. they have a strong relation with the composition scores. Secondly, phrasal constraints are partially open and active on the sentence level. Therefore, they have less contribution to fully displaying learners'writing ability and contribute less to the composition scores. While polywords are close in form and limited in function. Their contribution to composition scores has been restricted. What's more, due to the fact that institutional expressions are mainly proverbs and formulas for social interaction, they are rarely used in written discourse and could fulfill limited written requirements. Thus, they contribute little to the composition scores.Based on the above correlation analysis, the author makes some recommendations for future research. Formulaic language should be given sufficient priority in the English teaching and learning. Both the teachers and learners should adjust their attention to formulaic langue in terms of different types.