| Researches in the area of corpus linguistics have proved the ubiquity of formulaic sequences in natural discourse. Psycholinguists further testify that formulaic sequences are holistically stored and processed by language users to release the burden of information processing at the instant of speaking and writing. The automatic retrieval of multi-word sequences enables us to be fluent speakers and writers. Consequently, how to equip L2learners with nativelike formulaic strings has become a "hot" issue in second language acquisition. In the case of Chinese English majors, they are required to master authentic academic expressions and submit an academic thesis by the end of4-year study. However, formulaic sequences in academic register are quite distinctive from those in daily communication due to their complexity in structure and function. Thus it is necessary to investigate the processing and output of academic formulas in Chinese English majors, and to find out the most efficient way of teaching and learning these formulas.The present study was inspired by the Academic Formulas List (AFL) published by Ellis et al.(2010), with Chinese English majors as subjects, to investigate the representations of written academic formulaic sequences in their mental lexicon and output in untimed academic writing. Research questions are as follows:1) Can Chinese English majors process formulaic sequences holistically? If yes, which corpus-derived features (N-gram length, frequency, and Mutual Information) may affect their performance?2) Can they produce academic formulas in academic writing? If yes, what are the general characteristics of the formulas they have produced?3) What are the differences between junior subjects and freshmen subjects in psycholinguistic performance and writing output?4) Are there any connections between subjects’psychological sensitivity and their written output? Subjects in the present study were15freshmen and15junior students from a university in Jiangsu Province. A Phrase Classification Task was designed as the psycholinguistic experiment whose material was cited from the written part of the AFL, in which the reaction time of the subjects was recorded. Two weeks later, the subjects were asked to write a400words paper with a given topic in1week.Results from the first experiment shows that the junior subjects tend to retrieve the formulas as whole while the freshmen doesn’t; junior subjects are sensitive to the frequency and N-gram length of the formulaic strings while the freshmen are only sensitive to N-gram length; MI has no significant influence on both groups of subjects’ reaction time.Analysis of the writings indicates that formulas which are produced more than once are all high-frequency strings; most formulaic expressions in the AFL are not produced by the subjects.As to the inter-group difference, junior students respond significantly faster to formulaic sequences than the freshmen, and their output overwhelms that of the freshmen in terms of quantity, diversity and distribution. What is more, subjects’ performance in the psycholinguistic experiment can not predict their output of formulas in their writing.Findings from the present study suggest that Chinese English majors in their third-year of study are able to holistically process formulas and they rely heavily on intensive input to acquire them. The problem is that both groups of subjects are not efficient users of formulaic sequences in writing. It seems that they are not familiar with authentic expressions in academic context as their formulaic strings are scattered in their writing with less diversity and little pragmatic function. However, formula knowledge can be accumulated through classroom instruction for the junior subjects did a better job than the freshmen did in both experiments. The improvement in formula processing and output makes it clear that it is necessary and practical to strengthen formula instruction among Chinese English majors. |
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