An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Different Approaches To Output On The English Formulaic Language Acquisition Of Senior High School Students

In recent years,especially with the development of corpus linguistics,a large number of researchers have illustrated that formulaic language is ubiquitous in language use.More and more researchers and scholars turn their interest into the formulaic aspect of language and emphasize the importance of formulaic language.At the same time,in English learning and teaching,it is no difficulty for students and teachers to see that formulaic language appears in teaching materials and communication frequently and continually.Formulaic language plays a vital role in saving processing efforts,improving the language fluency,accuracy as well as proficiency and maintaining social interaction,so it is necessary for language learners to memorize and master formulaic language.Therefore,acquisition of formulaic language has attracted more attention of teachers and students and has became the most significant aspect in learning and teaching.According to the Swain’ output hypothesis,comprehensible output could promote second language acquisition.Retelling and translation which are regarded as two favorable output ways to facilitate students’ language acquisition,often used in English learning and teaching in senior high school.What are the effects of these two output ways on formulaic language acquisition? Which one is more effective and practical? In order to help teachers find out more effective formulaic language teaching way and help students acquire formulaic language efficiently,the thesis aims to exploring different effects of retelling and translation on the acquisition of formulaic language in senior high school.Here are the main research questions of the thesis:In immediate post-test,what are the effects of retelling and translation on the formulaiclanguage acquisition?In delayed post-test,what are the effects of retelling and translation on the formulaic language acquisition?For different types of formulaic language,what are the effects of retelling and translation in immediate post-test and delayed post-test?The experiment adopts New Standard English published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as the target teaching material.The participants are made up of 99 senior students from two parallel classes in No.1 Middle School of Qi Xian.Class1,consisting of 49 students,is regarded as the first experimental class,and students output the formulaic language by retelling.While class2 is another experimental class,students output the formulaic language by translation.The entire experiment was conducted between these two experimental classes.The experiment is composed of four phases: the pre-test,formulaic language teaching and learning,the immediate post-test as well as the delayed post-test.Finally,through further and detailed data analysis in SPSS,the findings are stated just as follows.According to students’ performance in immediate post-test,retelling and translation have comparable effect on formulaic language acquisition in short time.Retelling focuses learners’ attention on the pronunciation and the meaning of formulaic language and accelerate retention by repetition.Retelling enables students to have a better understand of formulaic language so that memorize and internalize them better.While translation lays stress on the spelling and meaning of formulaic language,but also the correct grammatical patterns and collocation are perceived.Accuracy and appropriateness of expression are promoted in the process of translation.In delayed post-test,there is significant difference between the retelling class and translation class.Although retelling also plays a dispensable role in formulaic language acquisition,translation is more advantageous to enhance formulaic language acquisition in the long time.As the result of the atmosphere without mental stress,students are more ready to do the translation practice and pay more attention to the knowledge itself.Translation practiceemphasizes on the accuracy of grammatical pattern and appropriateness of meaning expression of formulaic language.So given enough time,students in translation class can do better in formulaic language learning.On the other hand,retelling can deepen students’ comprehension of formulaic language and help students accumulate language knowledge by reorganizing language material,but also accelerate formulaic language acquisition by repetition.There is no denying that the retelling puts forward higher requirements for students and teachers in class.In the long run,many factors would decrease the effects of retelling,such as students’ unwillingness,attention distracting,idle talk and perseverance lacking and so on.In addition,it is difficult for students to process language material creatively,and interpret and integrate knowledge into schema actively.In immediate post-test,polywords,the fixed and consistent phrases,are hard to memorize,so retelling and translation have nearly equal effects in the short time.For phrasal constraints,there is no significant difference between the effects of the retelling and the translation.The flexible semantics and form present more difficulty for two classes’ students not only in understanding and memorizing,but also application of grammatical patterns.And retelling and translation achieved quite similar immediate effects on students’ institutionalized expressions acquisition.Translation practice provides specific context and the corresponding Chinese meaning for students,and retelling practice promotes students to use institutionalized expressions actively.In addition,no matter in retelling class or translation class,students can acquire sentence builders easily and quickly.The reason is that there is no difficulty for students on account of their intelligible semantics and form.In delayed post-test,the effects of retelling and translation on students’ polywords acquisition are different,students in the translation class can recall their polywords knowledge better.The requirement of accuracy,convention,and appropriateness in translation practice is more beneficial to acquire polywords which with strong stationarity in the long time.Additionally,translation is more favorable to phrasal constraints acquisition than retelling.As the canonical or non-canonical phrases which allow changes in words or phrases,phrasal constraints need to be focused on meaning and form.Translation task unifies the meaning andform to promote the absorption and internalization of the phrasal constrains.While as the limitation of attention capacity,students can not take meaning and form into account at the same time in the process of retelling.However,retelling is more conducive to the acquisition of institutionalized expressions in the long term.Since they posses the characteristics of applicability,integrality and rhythm,retelling is more suitable to be used in institutionalized expressions learning.For sentence builders,in delayed post-test,the effects of retelling is better than translation.In the process of retelling,students reorganize the language material,in order to make their expression more clear and logical,students try their best to use sentence builders to organize their discourse.While students likely ignore some simple transitional expressions in translation practice.Therefore,retelling is more available to the acquisition of sentence builders.