Study Of Senior High School English Reading From The Perspective Of Formulaic Language

Reading is an important way to acquire knowledge in second language learning. Reading and language learning are interdependent. There is no reading, without language learning. There is no doubt of the fact that among the four basic skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing, the cultivation of reading ability is the biggest challenge in today’s language teaching. Many students find that they spent huge amounts of time to learn a foreign language, but still can’t read smoothly. How can we cultivate the students’ reading ability to improve the students’ reading speed and fluency in learning English? This is the current focus in the field of foreign language teaching. Perfetti(1985) pointed out in his Verbal Efficiency Theory that a lot of reading comprehension difficulties are caused by lexical gap. In view of this, the author tries to explore the formulaic language’s role and effect in English reading teaching in senior high school from the perspective of the newest language theory-- Formulaic Language Theory.According to a survey done by Yin Zhiping(尹枝萍)in 2013,scholars’attention on the research of formulaic language have increased since 2004 year by year.Briefly,the formulaic language is the language unit or structure which has relatively stable structure,complete form and accustomed semantic meaning.It combines the advantages of grammar,semantics and context.It’s a true representation of natural language.It breaks the traditional sense of the word and collocation,expanding the category to sentence or even discourse,which benefits cultivating the ability of discourse comprehension.Therefore,the effective acquisition of formulaic language will draw the students’attention from individual words to the longer discourse.Consequently,the structure of the discourse becomes clear,and then the students are helped to view the discourse’s idea as a whole.At the same time,its great promotion on the generation and development of the second language is conducive to improving the students’ability of reading comprehension,which provides new ideas for English reading teaching in senior high school.In view of the above reasons, the present paper mainly studies three problems. The first one is whether the formulaic language has a positive influence on high school students’ ability of reading comprehension. The second one is whether the students have different views on reading before and after the experiment. The third one is how to guide the students to read under the Formulaic Language Theory in reading teaching. In order to solve the above three problems, 102 students from two classes of the same level in Grade 1 of Luochuan senior high school were selected for the experiment. From October 8th to January 9th, the experiment lasted 3 months(14 weeks in all excluding the national legal holidays). Before the experiment, the two classes conducted a questionnaire and a pre-test as well. The test materials were the first monthly test of the first semester. The result of the t-test of the pre-test was P=0.985 > 0.05, which showed that there was no significant difference between the two classes. During the experiment, author taught the two classes with different teaching methods. Namely, the experimental class adopted the formulaic language teaching approach, while the control class adopted traditional teaching method. After the experiment, a questionnaire was done in the experimental class, and the two classes were tested. The test materials were the final exam of the first semester. The result of the t-test of this post test was P=0.00 < 0.01, which showed that the two classes had a significant difference. Research data shows that the total scores and the average reading comprehension scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than the control class. Consequently, it is effective to use the Formulaic Language Theory in English reading teaching.