Abstract:One widely acknowledged indicator of second language proficiency is the mastery of idiomatic forms of expression, including idioms, collocations, and sentence frames and so on (collectively referred to as formulaic sequences). And how to effectively carry out teaching of formulaic sequences has become an urgent problem to be solved. This paper begins with a review of some related studies of input enhancement and text memorization in relation to learning and teaching of formulaic sequences. The paper then proceeds to examine the relative effectiveness of the two promising and widely used methods by means of a study over one week. Two classes of junior English majors from a key university were assigned respectively as Input Enhancement Group and Text Memorization Group. First they took a pretest which demonstrated that the two groups had approximately the same command of the 11 target chucks. They began to learn the target forms through the two different methods. One week later all of the subjects took a post-test and the data was collected and analyzed with the help of SPSS. The study found that the difference between pretest and post-test within each group was significant, which means both of the two methods can effectively facilitate acquisition of L2 formulaic sequences. However, the result also showed that scores for the two groups on the post-test were not statistically significant, which indicates that the input enhancement can be as effective as text memorization in facilitating acquisition of L2 formulaic sequences. Considering the great time and effort involved in reciting texts as well as the negative emotions it is likely to evoke, input enhancement may as well serve as a highly valid substitute for the former to achieve the same level of effectiveness.  

Keywords: formulaic sequences; input enhancement; text memorization; teaching methods

Contents

中文摘要

Abstract

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

Chapter 2 Literature Review-3

2.1 A Basic Characterization and Catagoriztion of Formulaic Sequences-3

2.1.1 Significance and Ubiquity of Formulaic Sequences-3

2.1.2 Categories of Fomulaic Sequences-4

2.2 Input Enhancement-5

2.3 Text Memorization-8

Chapter 3 Method -11

3.1 Subjects-11

3.2 Materials-11

3.3 Research Questions-11

3.4 Data Analysis-11

Chapter 4 Conclusion-17

References-19

Acknowledgements-20

Appendix1.21

Appendix 2 -22