25-05-2012, 04:02 PM
The effect of formulaic sequences trainingon fluency developmentin an ESL classroom
The effect of formulaic sequences training.ppt (Size: 1.01 MB / Downloads: 262)
What is Fluency?
Broad vs. narrow definition (Lennon, 1990)
Broad: general oral proficiency
Narrow: speed and smoothness of oral delivery
The rapid, smooth, accurate, lucid, and efficient translation of thought or communicative intention into language under the temporal constraints of on-line processing (Lennon, 2000, p. 26)
Fluency is
a characteristic of the speaker’s speech: performance fluency
a characteristic of the speaker: cognitive fluency
(Segalowitz, 2000)
Characteristics of a Fluent Speaker
Oral production poses greater working memory demands than written production
Fluent speech requires automatization of processes (e.g., Lennon, 2000; Segalowitz, 2000; Towell, Hawkins & Bazergui, 1996)
WM demands are also lowered by the use of prefabricated chunks of language, such as formulaic sequences (FSs):
FSs = Continuous or discontinuous sequences of words, which are, or appear to be, prefabricated (cf. Wray, 2002, p. 9)
How Formulaic Sequences are Learned
Wray (2002): L1 is learned holistically, but (older) L2 learners process FSs at the word level:
Incorrect formulaic sequence use is a result of constructing the sequence from parsed speech
Towell et al. (1996): Language is proceduralized into grammatically correct chunks. If the structure of a FS is incorrect, it has not been proceduralized.
However, L2 speaker often use many idiosyncratic, ungrammatical sequences (Oppenheim, 2000)
So L2 learners need to use formulaic sequences repeatedly to be able to retrieve them as chunks.
Results:Post-tests
Students used hardly any formulaic sequences in the immediate and delayed posttests
Both groups: no trained sequences
Pretraining group: 0.24 and 0.29 untrained sequences per student
No Pretraining group: 0.21 and 0 untrained sequences per student
However, the teachers reported the students did use the sequences in class