Formulaic sequences in EAP and SLA

Lyon 3 17/3/17GERAS 2017
TOWARDS THE CHARACTERISATION OF
LEXICO-GRAMMATICAL NORMS
FORMULAIC SEQUENCES IN
ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC
PURPOSES AND SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Shona Whyte, Université Côté d’Azur
Cédric Sarré, Université Paris Sorbonne

Whyte & SarréGERAS 17-03-17
EAP & SLA
Deﬁnitions of formulaic sequences
ESP corpus approach: learner-external
SLA approach: learner-internal
EAP teaching/learning research
OUTLINE
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• theory: processing, lexis, grammar
• clinical: language disorders
• development: L1 acquisition
• learning and teaching: SLA
• culture: oral traditions, variation
• corpora: recurrent wordstrings
FORMULAIC LANGUAGE
4
WRAY, 2012, LANGUAGE TEACHING

• genre analysis (Swales)
• contrastive rhetoric
• ethnographic approaches
• corpus-based analysis 
 
 
ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
5
FLOWERDEW, 2002,
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
• distinctive linguistic
features
• sub-technical
vocabulary
• highly conventionalised,
speciﬁc phraseology
• variation across genres
& disciplines 
 
GILQUIN, GRANGER & PAQUOT, 2012,
JOURNAL OF ENGLISH FOR
ACADEMIC PURPOSES

• unanalysed multiword
units
• a set of starter
utterances that give
entry into social
interactions
• these sequences form
the basis of developing
productive grammars 
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
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formulaic phrase
limited scope slot-and-frame
pattern
fully productive schematic
pattern
 
MYLES & CORDIER, 2017, STUDIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
MYLES, HOOPER & MITCHELL, 1998
L2L1

EAP & SLA
DEFINITIONS
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WRAY 2012
BRIEF HISTORY
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prefabs 1976 Bolinger
routines 1976 Gleason &
Weintraub
bootstrapping via multiword
units
1976 Wong-Fillmore
lexicalised sentence stems 1983 Pawley & Syder
ﬂuency depends on “islands
of reliability”
1984 Raupach

WRAY 2012
1990S
9
idiom principle versus open choice 1987/1991 Sinclair
lexical approach 1993 Lewis
formulaic language in SLA 1995 Weinert
construction grammar 1995 Goldberg
corpus approach to ﬁxed expressions
& idioms
1998 Moon
acquisition: formulaicity > productivity
> formulaicity
1999 Perkins

WRAY 2012
2000S
10
COBUILD: corpus research to
inform linguistic theory
2000 Huntson & Francis
best theory of grammar reﬂects
how we compute language in real
time
2002 Jackendorff
“formulas are lexical chunks that
result from binding frequent
collocations”
2002 Ellis
usage-based account of L1
acquisition
2003 Tomasello
lexical priming 2005 Hoey

WRAY 2012
2008-10
11
corpus approaches to multiword
strings
2008
Granger & Meunier,
Meunier & Granger
lexical bundles:“high frequency
word strings” in corpora
2009 Biber
state of the art (Pawley) 2009
Corrigan, Moravcsik,
Ouali & Wheatley
concgrams:“meaning shift unit” 2009
Cheng, Greaves,
Sinclair & Warren
academic formulas list 2010 Simpson-Vlach &
Ellis

SPEAKER-EXTERNAL VS SPEAKER INTERNAL DEFINITIONS
learner-external, or
linguistic deﬁnitions of
formulaic sequences
what is formulaic in the
language the learner is
exposed to, such as
idiomatic expressions or
collocations
12
learner-internal,
or psycholinguistic
deﬁnition
what is formulaic within
an individual learner and
therefore presents a
processing advantage for
that learner
MYLES & CORDIER 2017

EAP & SLA
LEARNER-EXTERNAL APPROACH
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MYLES & CORDIER 2017
SPEAKER-EXTERNAL APPROACH
• formal linguistics: irregularity (semantic - pull
your leg; syntactic - by and large)
• corpus linguistics: statistical frequency of
clusters in corpora (salt and pepper)
• pragmatic functions (will you marry me?)
• graded, not categorical - no clear boundary
FS vs non-FS
• preferential status of FS has consequences
for storage and retrieval of sequences by NS
14

SPEAKER-EXTERNAL APPROACH
1.corpus linguistics
2.psycholinguistics
3.educational perspective
15
ELLIS, SIMPSON-VLACH & MAYNARD 2008

1. Corpus linguistics
- statistical approach
• Gledhill 2000: phraseology of
scientiﬁc English
• Gablasova et al 2017: compare
association measures in general
British National Corpus versus
spoken subcorpora (& CANCODE)
• Paquot & Granger 2012:
contrastive interlanguage analysis
(CIA) of International Corpus of
Learner English
16
“frequency-based” approach,
which draws on quantitative
evidence about word co-
occurrence in corpora
Myles & Cordier 2017
The studies so far have focused
on identifying formulaic units
typical of a particular register or
genre and described the
frequency of occurrence of
these expressions according to
these settings
Gablasova, Brezina
& McEnery 2017

1. Corpus linguistics
- formal & functional approaches
• EAP research (Flowerdew &
Peacock, 2001; Hyland, 2004;
Swales, 1990): determine
functional patterns and
constructions of different
academic genres
• lexicographers (Hunston & Francis,
1996; Ooi, 1998): learner
dictionaries focusing on usage
more than definitions (Ellis et al
2008)
17
combine phraseological and
frequency-based
approaches: consider semantic
unity/fixedness of form and
word co-occurrence
=> a clearer picture of
collocational patterns associated
with certain groups of speakers
or a certain type of word co-
selection
Glabasova et al. 2017

2. Psycholinguistics
• formulaic sequences have
psycholinguistic reality (Pawley
& Syder 1983; Sinclair 1991 -
idiom principle)
• statistically deﬁned and extracted
FSs have “clear educational and
psycholinguistic validity” (Ellis et
al 2008)
• processing advantage? eye-
tracking, grammaticality judgment,
oral dictation tasks - mixed results
18
combining data, methods, and
models from language
learning research and
corpus linguistics has
potential for the investigation of
language acquisition
link corpus evidence to
psycholinguistic reality:
selection of a particular
collocational measure should
always be preceded and
motivated by a reﬂection on the
dynamics of language production
and its connection to
psycholinguistic processes
Glabasova et al. 2017

• idiomaticity and processing advantage are
two distinct phenomena
• idiomaticity and processing advantage go hand
in hand for NSs, but for L2 learners only in the
case of transparent or very common FSs
• corpus-derived FSs are not systematically
holistically stored and processed by NSs, let
alone by L2 learners
19
2. Psycholinguistics
- conclusions

3. Educational perspective
• Paquot & Granger 2008 frequency-based approach to FSs in corpora can
“inform the teaching of and material development for English for Academic
Purposes”
• Ellis et al 2008 : EAP - L2 learners have to know specific idioms, collocations
and lexical bundles to increase reading speed and comprehension and to write
in a native-like fashion
• Even advanced language learners have considerable difficulty with
collocations, often resulting from transfer of first language (L1) combinatorial
restrictions, and the frequency of these problems shows that learners need
instruction in these aspects of language
• The difficulty second language learners have in attaining nativelikeformulaic
idiomaticity and fluency raises issues of instruction (Nesselhauf, 2003
Meunier & Granger, 2008; Schmitt, 2004; Ellis et al 2008)
20

EAP & SLA
LEARNER-INTERNAL APPROACH
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MYLES & CORDIER 2017, WRAY 2002, 2008
SPEAKER-INTERNAL APPROACH
• a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of
words or other elements, which is, or appears to
be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved
whole from memory at the time of use, rather than
being subject to generation or analysis by the
language grammar (Wray 2002)
• discontinuity: “gaps for inserted variable
items” (Wray 2008) nice to ___ you (see/meet)
• a psycholinguistic FS is a multiword semantic/
functional unit that presents a processing
advantage for a given speaker, either because it
is stored whole in their lexicon or because it is
highly automatised (Myles & Cordier 2017)
22

Whyte & SarréGERAS 17-03-17 14
CORDIER 2013, WRAY & FITZPATRICK 2008, 2010
TWO L2 STUDIES
23

CORDIER 2013
FSS IN L2 FRENCH
• 5 English L1 learners of French L2
• third year abroad - tested before and
after 6 months
• 5 oral tasks (interview, story retell,
discussion) 1h40 min total per
speaker
• 3 measures - FSs, ﬂuency, lexical
diversity
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how do FSs help
speed up speech
production?

CORDIER 2013FINDINGS
• all 5 participants made gains
• increased ﬂuency
• increased lexical diversity
• more FSs - average proportion 27%
25

Whyte & SarréCORDIER 2013
26
“27 % of the language of advanced L2
learners consists of formulaic units presenting a
processing advantage. Most of these
sequences are grammatically-regular
sequences and only a minority are
idiomatic in the traditional sense of the term.”
“A clear link was […] found between FS and
formulaicity at the conceptual level: FS are
often resorted to when the learners express very
commonplace conceptual content”

WRAY & FITZPATRICK 2008, 2010
FSS IN ESL
• artiﬁcial use of prefabricated material
in conversation
• 6 Chinese or Japanese L1 students
at UK university, L2 English
• preparation, practice and
performance of conversations with
native speakers
• 21 conversations, 227 ten-word
utterances compared in Practice, Real
conversation, and Delayed conditions
27
what helps use of
prefabricated material
for what effects?

WRAY & FITZPATRICK 2008, 2010
FSS IN ESL
• participants varied in their
propensity to attempt utterances
and in accuracy of recall
• neither willingness to attempt
utterance nor accuracy linked to
proﬁciency
• use in practice predicted use in
real conversation
• failure to exploit conversational
openings and gratuitous
modiﬁcation of target utterances
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Whyte & SarréFITZPATRICK & WRAY 2006
29
Why should memorizing a word string and knowing that you can
reproduce it accurately not be enough to ensure that it is
reproduced accurately?
Why is there no clear relationship between accuracy and
proficiency?
the adult’s approach to language learning is constrained by
both biological and cultural factors that combine to make it
very difficult indeed to resist breaking down native-like
material into smaller units. The effect of doing so is to make it
hard to remember just how the units were originally
combined, and in the process of making good the shortfall in
this knowledge, the learner’s interlanguage rules must be
employed, compromising the accuracy of the
reproduction.

FITZPATRICK & WRAY 2006
30
Wray’s prognosis, in fact, is not hopeful for
most learners, who are predicted to remain
victims of over-analysis – that is,
unwrapping the packaging in the interests of
more eﬀective learning but, in the process,
losing vital information about how to put the
constituent units back together
Whyte & Sarré

EAP & SLA
EAP TEACHING & LEARNING
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WRAY 2012
ESP TEACHING RESEARCH
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multiple rehearsals of useful
multiword strings
1988 Gatbonton & Segalowitz
lexical approach 1993 Lewis
noticing formulaic language 2006
Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel,
Stengers & Demecheleer
text memorisation and imitation 2007 Ding
use of prefabricated material in
conversation
2010 Wray & Fitzpatrick
academic formulas list 2010 Simpson-Vlach & Ellis

Whyte & SarréGERAS 2017
LEARNER EXTERNAL
• distinction between lexical
bundles determined by frequency
and formulaic sequences
which have psychological validity
• ICA of learner corpora (ICLE) takes
a learner-external perspective and
focuses on differences with NS
usage of FS
• learners need FSs for fluency
and native-like proficiency
• build learner dictionaries from
usage studies rather than on
definitions (Ellis et al 2008)
• incorporate writing guides based
on errors in learner corpora
(Gilquin et al. 2007)
• noticing activities (Boers et al
2006; Lindstromberg et al 2016)
33

• L2 learners under/over/mis-use
externally defined FSs
compared with NSs
• learners use a substantial
proportion of internally defined
FSs, and these play a role in
developing proficiency (fluency)
• practising prefabricated material
of limited effectiveness
• L2 input and interaction may
promote acquisition/
automatisation of FSs
LEARNER INTERNAL
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DIDASP REPLICATION STUDY
DICTOGLOSS
• EAP text dictated at speed and
reconstructed in groups
• with and without FS selected
from Academic Formulas Lists
(Simpson-Vlach & Ellis 2010)
• noticing of speciﬁc FS
• L2 production task
35

Lyon 3 17/3/17GERAS 2017
36
Shona Whyte
whyte@unice.fr
Cédric Sarré
cedric.sarre@espe-paris.fr
wp.me/p28EmH-Jq

Formulaic sequences in EAP and SLA

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