A Study Of Formulaic Sequences And The Contribution Of Their Discourse Organization To Argumentative Writing Of Non-English Majors

Formulaicity is a universal characteristic of human languages. In a certain languagecommunity, abundant formulaic sequences are used frequently in communication. Fordecades the field of formulaic language has been noticed and studied by many scholarssuch as Nattinger and DeCarrio, Weinert, Schmitt, and Wray, etc., who have focused on theessence, definition, identification, categorization, functions of formulaic sequences, andtheir application in language learning and teaching.Formulaic language, based on ideas of cognitive and constructional grammar, providesa new perspective to the study and interpretation of language acquisition. The formulaicsequences are considered to be able to provide language learners with a large number ofprefabricated chunks for holistic memorization and production, allowing them not only tosave processing effort in both input and output of the target language, but to strengthentheir authenticity and appropriacy to a great extent in the application of the language.This thesis attempts to make a study of formulaic sequences and the contribution oftheir function as discourse organizers to English argumentative writing of non-Englishmajor college students. The research is based on the assumption that writing is one of theapproaches to assessing the competence of language learners in applying formulaicsequences, and the accuracy, appropriacy and authenticity in argumentative writing can beachieved to an ideal level by proficient use of formulaic discourse organizers. The researchis conducted on five classes of non-English major sophomores of Shanghai NormalUniversity. The procedures of the research are as follows:1. Assign a particular topic and have the students complete writing within time limit.2. Invite different teachers who have experience in rating CET compositions to rate thecompositions for two rounds without informing them of the purpose of the research.3. Select 120 valid sample compositions whose two rounds'scores are identical orclosest, and classify them evenly into three group as Rank A, B and C according to theirrange of scores. 4. Observe the use of formulaic discourse organizers in the samples in terms of times ofuse, accuracy and appropriacy by statistics with SPSS statistics software, and compare theobtained data among the three groups.5. Study some of the individual samples to investigate the effect of discourseorganizers on raters'evaluation of the compositions.The research finds out salient disparity of these parameters among the three groups.The research yields satisfying results and reaches the conclusion that the formulaicdiscourse organizers have a great contribution to the quality of English argumentativewriting, and can be counted as one of the norms for raters'evaluation.