Formulaic Language In Foreign Language Teaching

Formulaic language constitutes a large part of our language use.These kind of expressions are “essential parts of pragmatic competence and reflections of native-like behavior,and that they often express cultural values,social expectations,and speaker’s attitude”(Kecskes,2014: 105).As one kind of formulaic expressions,situation-bound utterances(SBUs)are “highly conventionalized,prefabricated pragmatic units whose occurrences are tied to standardized communicative situations”(Kecskes,2014: 72).SBUs have also played a special role in intercultural communication,because misunderstandings will arise due to a lack of knowledge of using them appropriately.However,little importance has been attached to SBUs in China’s EFL teaching.Few previous studies have been done towards EFL learners’ SBUs learning.It is necessary to investigate the current situation of EFL learners’ mastery of SBUs on the one hand,and the strategies of teaching SBUs on the other.Therefore,the present study is aimed to answer three research questions as follow: 1.Why should we attach more importance to situation-bound utterances?And what role do situation-bound utterances play in foreign language teaching? 2.What is the current situation of EFL learners’ mastery of situation-bound utterances after they have the listening and speaking course? 3.How can we incorporate situation-bound utterances into classroom pedagogy?The present study first collects and classifies the SBUs in a being-used EFL textbook,then compares the identified expression with recurrent patterns in existing corpora.With the identified SBUs,the author conducts a questionnaire for 143 Chinese EFL learners to look into their status quo of SBUs learning.And by adopting native speakers’ preference,a teaching worth list is provided as referential material for EFL teaching.The major findings of this study are as follows:(1)SBUs play an important role in foreign language teaching.However,little attention has been paid on it both in the field of research and teaching.(2)Chinese EFL learners have learned some SBUs;however,they feel difficult in interpreting newly-presented ones;(3)A teaching worth list of 8 categories have been provided as a result of corpora retrieval and questionnaires.In this list,the representative SBUs,their functions as well as the possible replies have been presented(as in Table 4.13).It is necessary to instruct flexible replying to SBUs in EFL teaching.And the setting of situations and classification of SBUs helps a lot in such teaching.To improve EFL learners’ pragmatic competence and foreign language fluency,the author advocates methodologies focusing on context-appropriate collocations and other types of formulaic sequences.