An Empirical Study On The Application Of Formulaic Sequences To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

For the causes of restriction of vocabulary, negative transfer of native language and absence of writing skills, Chinese students are weak in English writing. In order to teach high school students write accurate and authentic English compositions, this present study draws formulaic sequences into the English writing teaching in senior high schools.As for special multi-word items combining vocabulary and grammar feature, formulaic sequences consists of a sequence of two or more words, it forms a meaningful and inseparable unit semantically and syntactically, which can be reserved in brain as a whole unit, recognized and retrieved during usage automatically without grammar generation, saving processing time of brain. The semi-fixed and patterned features of formulaic sequences also have great influences on writing capacity of senior high school students, which makes the empirical study on the application of formulaic sequences to English Writing Teaching become valuable.The study takes an empirical study on the application of formulaic sequences to English writing teaching in senior high schools. To be specific, it endeavors to explore:(1) What influences does FSs writing teaching have on English writing scores of senior high school students?(2) What influences does FSs writing teaching have on FSs number in the compositions of senior high school students?(3)What are the relationships between the number of different types of FSs and the grade of compositions?The subjects of teaching experiment are two same-level classes of grade two in the High School Attached to the Hunan Normal University. After experimental condition is satisfied, the present paper choose one of the classes as experimental class randomly, which probes the new writing teaching method by helping students to recognize, import, practice, accumulate and apply formulaic sequences aiming at the writing features of senior high school students. While another class employs formal writing teaching way, which is set as contrastive class. After a semester’s teaching, they took part in writing test again. Their writing samples are analyzed by manual computation and SPSS software. In order to improve the FSs writing teaching of FSs and find its defect, the research conducted an interview for ten students from high-level students and low-level students of experimental class separately after teaching experiment.Through contrastive analyze of formulaic sequences amount and score of two classes’ compositions in the writing pretest and posttest, we can draw answers for our research questions.1. The implementation of formulaic sequences contributes much to the improvement of students’ writing scores. Under the precondition that all the other experimental conditions are same, the writing grades’ increase of experimental class under FSs writing teaching model surpass control class under traditional teaching way significantly. Student’s improvements in writing reflect on better discourse organization, idiomatic, accurate and fluent expression, appropriate word selection, and reduction of grammatical errors.2. FSs writing teaching model can increase the FSs number used in composition notably. After a semester’s experiment, FSs number of experimental class is notably higher than control class. And students in EC have stronger consciousness to use FSs. Phrasal constraints and sentence builders are used most frequently and increased fastest in four types of FSs after FSs writing instruction. And there exist significant differences of the usage amount between pretest and posttest of polywords, while institutionalized expressions are not.3. There is a positive linear relationship between the number of FSs used by senior high students and their writing scores. That is to say, those who use more FSs in compositions are more likely to obtain good scores. Further analysis points out that the influence of phrasal constraints and sentence builders for the change of grades of compositions are significant, and the changes of polywords and institutionalized expressions are not that prominent. Therefore, teachers should reinforce the writing training of these influential aspects, especially developing learners’ self-learning ability and reinforcing output training of applying FSs.By generalizing beneficial enlightenment, we are looking forward to making senior high school students acquire accurate and authentic English writing skills actually.