Research And Practice On Formulaic Language Teaching In Junior Middle School English Class

Formulaic language is a kind of linguistic phenomenon, which exists in both written and spoken English. Formulaic language conforms to the customs of language expression. It combines semantic, context with pragmatic function. This characteristic is helpful for students to use vocabulary correctly. In recent years, scholars launched a series of studies in formulaic language teaching from different perspectives. However, domestic scholars’ study more focused on higher education. Almost no research made it clear that how to carry out formulaic language teaching so as to promote students’ formulaic language acquisition.Based on Ellis’ s formulaic language acquisition model, this paper focuses on the junior middle school students and tentatively puts forward the formulaic language teaching procedure: recognition, attention, memory, imitation and application. Besides that, the author describes how to operate this teaching procedure and conducts a teaching experiment in the junior middle school English class. This experiment is designed to detect whether the formulaic language teaching will help students acquire the formulaic language. The research focus on solving the following questions: 1. The current situation of students mastering and applying the formulaic language. 2. How to program the formulaic language teaching in junior middle school students? What are the specific steps of formulaic language teaching? 3. Effects of English formulaic language teaching in junior middle school.The specific steps are as follows: 1. guide students to identify the formulaic language; 2. attract students’ attention on formulaic language; 3. guide students to memorize the formulaic language; 4. using a variety of exercises to consolidate the formulaic language; 5. cultivate students’ ability of using the formulaic language. At last, post-test of writing and questionnaire survey are conducted to collect related data.According to analysis results of experimental data, the students of experiment class, who got the higher grades, did much better than those of the comparative class in the use of formulaic language in writing English test. Questionnaire survey results showed that formulaic language teaching could help to develop students’ interest and confidence in English learning.