In this introductory chapter, the rationale of this study is first presented, followed by the motivation. Research questions are subsequently posed to clarify the purpose of the study.

Chapter1 Introduction

In this introductory chapter, the rationale of this study is first presented, followed by the motivation. Research questions are subsequently posed to clarify the purpose of the study.

1.1 Rationale

Language learners have long equated knowing a word to knowing its definition, its spelling, and sometimes its prosodic features (Thornbury, 2002). This mentality is particularly prevalent in this instant-gratification age of computers and electronic dictionaries. However, knowing a word by this standard hardly guarantees EFL learners’ accurate use of a “known” word. Language learners are thus usually found producing grammatically acceptable expressions which are in fact unacceptable to native speakers (Lewis, 2000). For example: *the most advantage instead of the best advantage, *agree the proposal instead of agree with the proposal, *do some trade instead of conduct trade, *eat medicine instead of take medicine, *wash film instead of develop film, *an internal wound instead of an internal injury, etc… (the examples are taken from Lin, 2002, Tseng, 2002, and Tang, 2004). The collocational mistakes presented in the above examples, show that learners may only have a superficial knowledge of a known word that is not sufficient for them to communicate accurately or fluently.

This standard of vocabulary knowledge (knowing a word only by definition, spelling and prosodic features) has been challenged since the 70’s (Richards, 1976).

According to Richards (1976) and Nation (1990), knowing a word means knowing the

following characteristics of a word:

1. its spoken form and written form, 2. its concept (meaning),

3. its semantic values (its proposition), 4. its different meanings (polysemy), 5. its underlying forms and derivations,

6. its schema (its place in a network of associations with other words in the language),

7. its limitations of use according to function and situation, 8. its frequency,

9. its syntactic behavior and grammatical patterns, and

10. its collocations (the sorts of words most likely to be found associated with it).

It is obvious that word knowledge is far beyond the link between meaning and form (Laufer & Goldstein, 2004). Language teachers, however, have not paid

deserved attention to the richness of word knowledge in English teaching (Chen, 2004;

Sue, 2004). Teachers’ beliefs affect teaching to a large extent, and they further influence students’ learning (Chen, 2004). In a frequency distribution of teachers’

practices of vocabulary instruction, Taiwanese English teachers put 48.3% of the

classroom time on pronunciation, 30.1% on meaning, and merely 15% on word usage

(Chen, 2004). The majority of the classroom time, in other words, is devoted to

handling form-and-sound correspondence and word meaning, whereas how to use a

word appropriately is less emphasized in explicit vocabulary instruction. In this way,

language teachers leave a strong impression to the EFL learner that syntactic behavior,

grammatical patterns and collocations may not be the main objectives in acquiring

word knowledge (Bahns and Eldaw, 1993). Bathed in this kind of environment, a

learner may try to expand his vocabulary size but neglect the depth of vocabulary

knowledge (Qian, 2002). This contributes to an insidious discrepancy between the

breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge (Hsu, 2004; Jiang, 2004).

If syntactical and lexical collocation knowledge are not formally introduced in regular vocabulary instruction, where is the foothold? Language teaching traditionally viewed grammar and vocabulary as two independent domains, with the former

category consisting of structures and the latter usually consisting of single words (Harwood, 2002). Actually, every word has its own grammar (Gettys, 1998). It is a pity to abandon the opportunity of teaching syntactical knowledge along with

vocabulary instruction. Greater emphasis on large chunks of language, as a matter of fact, means that grammar and vocabulary merge into one another. Paying attention to the whole chunk of phrases as units simplifies the psychological processing of a message (Nattinger, 1980). For example, in learning the word famous, a learner should learn it with its companion in the form of be famous for/as. With the chunk in mind, the learner will never create an expression with a missing verb or a missing preposition. He can easily compose a sentence like Psyche is famous for her beauty.

In listening and reading, he can process the information more easily. What he decodes is only three chunks, Psyche is famous for her beauty, instead of six words. Accurate comprehension is therefore more likely to happen. With the hope to overcome second language learners’ difficulty in using words properly in real-life situations, language teachers now are expected to bring more lexical syntagms into vocabulary instruction (Harwood, 2002).

Halliday (1961, 1994) advocated the idea of lexicogrammar (Singleton, 2000). In his perspective, there exists no sharp divide between lexis and syntax, and they

actually lie on the two ends of one continuum. Word knowledge of a word naturally

contains certain syntactic and lexical frames, which regulate the environments where

the word probably occurs. In this way, to differentiate, for example, a countable noun

(e.g. kitty) and a mass noun (e.g. air), the distinction will be clearer if we look at their

respective occurring contexts. A countable noun can occur after numerals (There are three new-born kitties.) or after quantifiers like several and many (Many girls wore mini-skirts in the ball.), while a mass noun can occur after neither numerals nor several/many, but can occur after a quantifier like much and little (He found that there was much money in the wallet. /Out of politeness, she drank little milk tea even if it smelled bad.) (Singleton, 2000). In brief, Halliday’s contention depicts that lexis and syntax are in a partnership, and structures of language emerge from individual structures of lexical items. The distinction between lexicon and syntax are more blurred than ever with the advent of lexical phrases and formulaic sequences.

What are formulaic sequences? The word formulaic carries with it associations of unity and of custom and habit, while sequences indicates that there is more than one discernible internal unit, of whatever kind (Wray, 2002). Formulaic sequences, e.g.

heavy smoker, long time no see, once in a blue moon, air bag, make a remark, I’m finished, I’ll see you, etc. (Weinert, 1995, pp.186, 187; Singleton, 2000, pp.49-53), describe the phenomenon that certain words co-occur so frequently that they are lexicalized and become part of our mental lexicon, the data base of our lexical knowledge (Singleton, 2000; Moudraia, 2001). These lexicalized phrases or clauses are usually treated as a single entry in language processing (Nattinger, 1980; Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992). Being holistically stored, they are encoded and decoded more efficiently than others (Sosa & MacFarlane, 2002). In other words, by means of formulaic sequences, communication can be more manageable and efficient in both production and comprehension (Pawley and Syder, 1983; Richards, 1983; Harwood, 2002).

In previous studies, over fifty terms have ever been used to describe the

phenomenon of formulaicity of language: automatic expressions, fixed expressions,

formulas, frozen phrases, collocations, phraseology, prefabricated routines,

ready-made language, routine formulae, chunks, unanalyzed chunks of speech, unanalyzed multiword chunks, wholes, or formulaic sequences etc. just to name a few (Weinert, 1995; Wray, 2002). The present study will follow Weinert (1995), Wray (2002), and Schmitt & Carter (2004), and adopt the term formulaic sequences with one commonly acknowledged definition—formulaic sequences are sequences, continuous or discontinuous, of words which are stored and retrieved, produced or recalled as a whole chunk at the time of use, much like an individual item, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by individual lexical items/forms with

linguistic rules.

1.2 Motivation

This study was inspired by my own teaching experience. My students were vocational high school students who had been learning English for at least five years.

Most of them thought that English as an international language was very important in

their future career. To raise their English proficiency, they had been persuaded to

memorize lots of words. However, they still could not produce and comprehend the

language effectively. When they wrote, they failed to produce complete sentences or

to express themselves effectively, and when they read, they were decoding every

single word but not able to grasp the overall meaning of the text. Five-year studying

did not successfully turn them into proficient English users. Their proficiency level

was far below intermediate, and the students themselves were not satisfied with their

English competence. The problem, unfortunately, was that they did not know how to

improve their English. Most learners who intended to make breakthroughs turned to

studying English grammar as a solution, and that was the treatment they asked for

from me, their English teacher. It nevertheless appeared to be sarcastic that grammar

class was the very course that made the learners uncomfortable and drowsy. Grammar explanation and drills overwhelmed them.

Similar to my students, Taiwanese English learners tend to believe that vocabulary and grammar are two key contributors that can upgrade their English competence, and thus these two have been the learning focus (Sue, 2004). On the one hand, teachers don’t do much on vocabulary teaching, but ask students to memorize as large amounts of vocabulary as possible. The assistance students get is usually a never-ended word list and a series of never-ended tests. On the other hand, teachers do too much on grammar teaching. They explain every grammatical detail even when an expression is comprehensible in itself. Teachers tend to over-analyze grammar, which is not necessary for successful learning and which even impedes learners to achieve the goal (Lewis, 1993). Resulting from the linguistic knowledge training language teachers have, quite a few language teachers found it tempting to take apart a sentence, to break it into pieces, and then to explain every word in the sentence (Lai, 2004). The sad truth is that this energy-costing way of teaching does not lead to better learning but frustrates the students. After all, not every student wants to be a linguist in the future. In contrast, most L2 learners want to be a fluent language user, able to communicate effectively.

Now to fight these two learning nightmares, vocabulary and grammar, could be easier than before, for they are not two separate issues but actually a single one. The dividing line between lexis and grammar is actually much less clear-cut than teachers and textbooks used to present (Krashen, 1981; Weinert, 1995; Lewis, 2000;

Daudaravivius & Marcinkeviviene, 2004). Due to the impact of Lewis’s Lexical

Approach, more and more language teachers hold the belief that lexis should be one

of the central organizing principles of their syllabus, which implies less emphasis on

grammar analysis. Lewis’s (1993, p. vi) famous statement goes like this, “language

consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.” Vocabulary should be the core of language and teaching, and words should be put in chunks to learn.

Mainly following Lewis’s Lexical Approach, this study tries to propose a simple but systematic way of teaching to help learners jump out of their learning swamp.

Word study is the center of our instruction, and our motif is to teach a language in chunks, formulaic sequences.

1.3 Research questions

The present study appears to be significant in three ways. First, it makes an attempt to propose an empirical model for teaching through formulaic sequences instruction. As mentioned in the previous section, formulaic sequences teaching may be a quick entry for EFL learners for its feature of chunking. However, we merely know its importance in language use, but we are still not sure how to put the knowledge of chunking into practical teaching. Lewis’s lexical approach has been criticized as “a journey without maps” (Thornbury, 1998, p.7). Even though teaching in chunks works as an easy, simple notion, classroom language teachers are confused to find no specific related syllabus to follow. To establish a possible realization of the approach is thus desirable.

Lewis (1993; 1997; 2000) emphasized in his series of books on the Lexical Approach the importance of “noticing.” He even sorted it as a prerequisite in formulaic sequences teaching (Lewis, 2000, pp.162, 163), and that has also been supported by many other researchers (e.g. Schmidt, 1990; Skehan, 1996; Hill, 2000;

Tseng, 2002). For instance, Schmidt (1990) believed that the more a learner is

consciously aware of (notices) certain input, the more likely he processes the

information and turns it into intake. Consequently, in our formulaic sequences

instruction we would bear the noticing method in mind and design exercises to raise the learners’ awareness to formulaic expressions. We expect our lesson design to direct the participants’ attention to the notion of chunking, to the popularity of fixed language uses, and to the flexibility of prefabricated strings.

Second, the study places focus on vocational high school students, who are mostly low-proficient English learners. On average they have taken formal English instruction for at least three years. Nevertheless, their proficiency is still quite low.

Their inability may be traced back to their own ways of learning and the teachers’

instruction. It is assumed that instead of being confined to the grammar-translation learning, they need a change and ought to be exposed to a new teaching approach (Chen, 2004). If equipped with formulaic sequences knowledge, learners can encode or decode texts more efficiently because of the simplification of processing. Since the low-proficient learners are commonly trapped by grammar, it can be a good trial for them to learn through formulaic sequences which develop a language from

vocabulary.

Thirdly, the study especially looks at the learning outcomes of the receptive skills. We attach importance to reception skills of our participants specifically for three reasons. First of all, the previous studies regarding formulaic sequences are mostly concerned with the occurrences of the formulaic sequences in the learner’s production, the types and sources of formulaic errors in the learner’s production, and the strategies exercised in producing the sequences, whereas the reception skills are ignored. Communication is bi-directional. Only production cannot lead to successful communication, but a combination of production and reception will do. The reception skills deserve equal attention.

Another reason is that reception skills are a good starting point for beginners in

learning a language (Myles, 2004). The early stages of language learning are

characterized by the students’ struggle to make sense out of the new language. For beginners and low-proficient learners, it’s the reception of lexis that works as the most important activities (Lewis, 1993). For the EFL learners, to produce the language is more anxiety-causing than to perceive (Sue, 2004). In other words, reading and listening are less threatening than writing and speaking. Because there is a negative correlation between target language exercise and anxiety (Levine, 2003), the receptive skills, which are more welcome to low-proficient learners, then function as a good initiation to beginning level EFL learners.

A third reason is that the enhancement of the receptive skills satisfies the practical need of the vocational school students—our target subjects, who think of English as a requirement for exams (Sue, 2004). In the formal Taiwanese entrance exams for vocational high school students, they are simply tested on reading and listening abilities. That is to say, the gains on these two receptive skills play an important role in fulfilling their practical goals in the near future.

Following the line, the focus of the study is three folds. Our predominant goal is to establish a basic model of using formulaic sequences in language teaching. The interactions between systematic formulaic sequences instruction and learners’ second language learning progress is to be investigated, especially on their receptive skills, namely, listening and reading. Furthermore, learners’ attitudes and perception toward formulaic sequences teaching are what we are eager to know as well. The specific research questions are as the following:

Q1. Can explicit formulaic sequences instruction help vocational high school students improve their listening ability?

Q2. Can explicit formulaic sequences instruction help vocational high school students improve their reading ability?

Q3. How do the learners perceive the formulaic sequences instruction?