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English Literacy Development in Mainland Chinese Secondary English Classrooms: Pedagogical Recommendations for Enhancing Formulaic Language
Abstract
This chapter concerns the relationship between second language (L2) literacy development and formulaic language instruction for secondary school classrooms in mainland China. It begins by defining L2 literacy and then through a succinct literature review, we discuss the relationship between L2 formulaic knowledge and L2 literacy development (i.e., L2 reading comprehension and L2 writing). Next, we discuss plausible reasons that have hindered Chinese secondary learners’ formulaic language learning. Then, to encourage an increase in formulaic language in Chinese secondary education classrooms, we offer up useful teaching principles and learning activities proposed in previous studies. We feel these principles and activities have the potential to help teachers make informed decisions about what formulaic language should be taught and how they should go about it.
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Foreign language (FL) knowledge has been shown to contribute significantly to FL reading performance. Studies have contrasted
the contribution of FL vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, following a dichotomous view of these components, producing mixed
results. Despite the increasingly recognized formulaic nature of language, the contribution made by phraseological knowledge
to reading ability has not been investigated systematically. This study examines the impact of a broader construct definition
of linguistic knowledge—which includes a phraseological component—in explaining variance in reading performances. Test scores
of 418 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) were modeled in a structural equation model, showing that a phraseological
knowledge measure outperformed traditional syntactic and vocabulary measures in predicting reading comprehension variance.
Additional insights into the role of phraseological knowledge were gained through verbal protocol analysis of 15 EFL learners
answering reading comprehension items that targeted the understanding of phrasal expressions within written context. The findings
hint at an underestimated, but critical, role of phraseological knowledge in FL reading, and are relevant to both the assessment
and the teaching of EFL ability.
As researchers and practitioners are becoming more aware of the importance of multi-word items in English, there is little doubt that phrasal verbs deserve teaching attention in the classroom. However, there are thousands of phrasal verbs in English, and so the question for practitioners is which phrasal verbs to focus attention upon. Phrasal verb dictionaries typically try to be comprehensive, and this results in a very large number of phrasal verbs being listed, which does not help practitioners in selecting the most important ones to teach or test. There are phrasal verb lists available (Gardner and Davies, 2007; Liu, 2011), but these have a serious pedagogical shortcoming in that they do not account for polysemy. Research indicates that phrasal verbs are highly polysemous, having on average 5.6 meaning senses, although many of these are infrequent and peripheral. Thus practitioners also need guidance about which meaning senses are the most useful to address in instruction or tests. In response to this need, the PHrasal VErb Pedagogical List (PHaVE List) was developed. It lists the 150 most frequent phrasal verbs, and provides information on their key meaning senses, which cover 75%+ of the occurrences in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The PHaVE List gives the percentage of occurrence for each of these key meaning senses, along with definitions and example sentences written to be accessible for second language learners, in the style of the General Service List (West, 1953). A users’ manual is also provided, indicating how to use the list appropriately.
The present study investigates the collocational profiles of (1) three series of graded textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) commonly used in Taiwan, (2) the written productions of EFL learners, and (3) the written productions of native speakers (NS) of English. These texts were examined against a purpose-built collocation list. Based on the British National Corpus (BNC), the collocation list comprises 43,875 verb–noun collocations, the nodes of which were drawn from a prescribed wordlist (Jeng, Chang, Cheng, & Gu, 2002) to be learned on completion of the secondary education in Taiwan. Findings show that overall the collocational density and diversity of the textbooks are comparable to those of NS essays. Nonetheless, only small proportions of collocations within the repertoire were presented in the textbooks, and these collocations did not recur enough for the learner to consolidate collocational knowledge. Compared with their NS equivalents, learners’ writing exhibited an inordinate degree of collocational density and limited collocational diversity, suggesting that they did have the need to construct utterances with collocations, but were inhibited by a underdeveloped sense of collocational knowledge. Implications for learning/teaching collocations and materials designing are discussed.
There is little dispute that formulaic sequences form an important part of the lexicon, but to date there has been no principled
way to prioritize the inclusion of such items in pedagogic materials, such as ESL/EFL textbooks or tests of vocabulary knowledge.
While wordlists have been used for decades, they have only provided information about individual word forms (e.g. the General Service List (West 1953) and the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000)). This article addresses this deficiency by presenting the PHRASal Expressions List (PHRASE List), a list of the 505 most frequent non-transparent multiword expressions in English, intended especially for receptive use.
The rationale and development of the list are discussed, as well as its compatibility with British National Corpus single-word
frequency lists. It is hoped that the PHRASE List will provide a basis for the systematic integration of multiword lexical
items into teaching materials, vocabulary tests, and learning syllabuses.
The goal of this study was to explore the contribution that a dynamic usage based (DUB) perspective can bring to the establishment of objective measures to assess L2 learners’ written texts and at the same time to gain insight into the dynamic process of language development. Four hundred and thirty seven texts written by Dutch learners of English as an L2 with similar backgrounds were holistically coded for proficiency level, which ranged from beginner to intermediate (A1.1 to B1.2 according to the Common European Framework of Reference). Each text was hand coded for 64 variables as distilled from the literature at
sentence, phrase, and word level. Statistical analyses showed that broad, frequently occurring, measures known to distinguish between proficiency levels of writing expertise did so in this corpus too: sentence length, the Guiraud index, all dependent clauses combined, all chunks combined, all errors combined, and the use of present and past tense. However, almost all specific constructions showed non-linear development, variation, and changing relationships among the variables as one would expect from
a dynamic usage based perspective. Between levels 1 and 2 mainly lexical changes took place, between levels 2 and 3 mainly syntactic changes occurred, and between levels 3 and 4 both lexical and syntactic changes appeared. The transition between levels 4 and 5 was characterized by lexical changes only: particles, compounds, and fixed phrases. The study shows that even short writing samples can be useful in assessing general proficiency at the lower levels of L2 proficiency and that a cross-sectional study of
samples at different proficiency levels can give worthwhile insights into dynamic L2 developmental patterns.
The relationship between oral language development and the development of literacy skills in a second or foreign language is complex. Many English teachers may be unaware of the role that oral language development plays in the development of literacy skills. This entry presents some of the issues that teachers must consider in sorting out the relationships between oral language development and literacy, such as whether literacy instruction should be built on a solid oral language base or taught as learners are developing oral language skills. Pedagogical implications for oral language development and literacy are also presented as they relate to the timing of instruction, early intervention, and the development of reading comprehension skills.
A considerable proportion of our everyday language is 'formulaic'. It is predictable in form, idiomatic, and seems to be stored in fixed, or semi-fixed, chunks. This book explores the nature and purposes of formulaic language, and looks for patterns across the research findings from the fields of discourse analysis, first language acquisition, language pathology and applied linguistics. It gradually builds up a unified description and explanation of formulaic language as a linguistic solution to a larger, non-linguistic, problem, the promotion of self. The book culminates in a new model of lexical storage, which accommodates the curiosities of non-native and aphasic speech. Parallel analytic and holistic processing strategies are the proposed mechanism which reconciles, on the one hand, our capacity for understanding and producing novel constructions using grammatical knowledge and small lexical units, and on the other, our use of prefabricated material which, though less flexible, also requires less processing.
Cambridge Core - ELT Applied Linguistics - Learning Vocabulary in Another Language - by I. S. P. Nation
This chapter is situated in the context of English language teaching and learning in China. To be specific, I attempt to look at the connection of corpus studies with materials development in China. I use two corpora, the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC; Gui and Yang, 2003) and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB; Mair, 1997; Hundt, Sand and Siemund, 1998), to summarize explicit similarities and differences in collocation usage between Chinese English learners (CELs) and native speakers. My goal is to understand better Chinese learners’ collocation knowledge and development in their process of learning English as a foreign language.
This popular text, now in its third edition, 'unpackages' the various dimensions of literacy - linguistic (the nature of language, oral-written language relationships, language variation); cognitive (constructive nature of perception, the reading process, understanding written discourse, the writing process); sociocultural (literacy as social practices, authority of written discourse); and developmental (constructing the written language system) - and at the same time accounts for the interrelationships among them. Distinguished by its examination of literacy from a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective, it provides a strong conceptual foundation upon which literacy curriculum and instruction in school settings can be grounded. Dimensions of Literacy links theory and research to practice in an understandable, user-friendly manner; provides in-depth coverage of the various dimensions of literacy; and includes demonstrations, hands-on activities, authentic reading and writing events that reflect key concepts, and tables and figures that summarize the concepts. Changes in the third edition: provide more clearly focused discussion on the nature of language and addresses the role of various other sign systems in reading and writing cover new research on eye movements and miscue analysis (EMMA) and reading fluidity (i.e., flow) expand the discussion of bilingualism and biliteracy through the book extend the discussion of new literacies/multiliteracies/multimodal literacies include updated references throughout the entire book. © 2001, 2004 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
The purpose of this study was to use sophisticated eye-tracking techniques to investigate how multi-word units (MWUs) were processed by learners who learned English as a foreign language. During the recent two decades, there has been a growing interest in exploring MWUs in language use. Research conducted to study MWUs includes, for example, descriptions of MWUs in large-scale corpora (e.g. Erman & Warren, 2000), discussions pointing out significance of MWUs for L2 teaching (e.g. Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), analyses of discourse functions of MWUs in either L1 or L2 productions (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004), etc. One research issue which also has attracted considerable attention concerns how MWUs are processed in real time. Specifically, it has been suggested that working memory is restricted in its capacity, and, to ease the problem of the capacity limitation and to receive/produce language fluently, human beings appear to develop a processing advantage for multi-word sequences (Pawley & Syder, 1983). This advantage has been evidenced by some recent psycholinguistic experiments (e.g. Conklin & Schmitt, 2008; Jiang & Nekrasova, 2007), which found that this advantage was enjoyed not only by L1 speakers, but by high-level L2 learners as well. In this study, we would like to contribute to the literature on L2 learners' MWU processing while our experiment differed from the previous research in two important respects. First, unlike the previous studies which were conducted in ESL contexts, this study tested EFL learners. Given that the L2 input of second language and foreign language learners is largely different, it is necessary to find out whether foreign language learners who rely mainly on written input also show the processing advantage for MWUs. Second, rather than use high achievers as subjects, we focused on intermediate-level L2 learners in an attempt to see if there was a need to reach high L2 levels to develop the processing advantage. The subjects of this study were thirty college students in Taiwan who had learned English as a foreign language for around six years. We employed eye-tracking techniques to observe the subjects' reading of thirty MWUs, including both recurrent multi-word strings derived from British National Corpus (e.g. as a matter of fact) and some common idioms (e.g. over the hill) put in sentences. The last words of those MWUs were embedded in non-MWU contexts for comparison (e.g. …whether this is a fact or…). Our assumption was, if the subjects showed the processing advantage for the MWUs, they would process the final words of the MWUs more quickly than the same words in non-MWU contexts.
The activities in a language course can be classified into the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. In a well designed course there should be an even balance of these strands with roughly equal amounts of time given to each strand. The research evidence for the strands draws on the input hypothesis and learning from extensive reading, the output hypothesis, research on form-focused instruction, and the development of speaking and reading fluency. The paper concludes with 10 principles based largely on the four strands. The strands framework and the principles provide a basis for managing innovation in language courses.
This study investigates whether two different means of learning the word sequence ‘despite the fact (that)’ lead to differential outcomes of the acquisition of the grammatical structure imbedded in the word string which is, due to L1 transfer, especially problematic for Chinese learners of English. The participants of the study were randomly divided into two groups. While one group was taught the grammatical structure under investigation through explicit instruction, the other group was required to commit the word string to memorization through repetition or recitation without being given any explicit instruction. It turns out, following the results of subsequent tests, that the recitation group significantly outperformed the instruction group in terms of procedural knowledge whereas the instruction group outperformed the recitation group on declarative knowledge. The inference that can be drawn from the study, among other things, is that the memorization of the whole word string may facilitate the acquisition of the imbedded structure, especially on the procedural level, whereas explicit instruction can only exert visible influence on the awareness of knowledge. One explanation for the result is that ‘despite the fact (that)’ was memorized as an unanalysed whole, i.e. chunk. It is suggested that formal criteria for grouping phrases be introduced in language teaching programmes.
A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000–8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure are other kinds of words—multiword expressions—not accounted for by current estimates based on frequency lists. Such expressions are often composed of highly frequent words, and therefore it is possible that such items may go unnoticed by learners reading in the second language. To test this assertion, a two-part test was taken by 101 adult Brazilian learners of English: One part contained short texts composed of the top 2,000 words in English; the second part contained the exact same words, however the arrangement of these same words constituted multiword expressions (e.g., large, and, by → by and large). Tests of reading comprehension indicated that learners' comprehension not only decreased significantly when multiword expressions were present in text but students also tended to overestimate how much they understood as a function of expressions that either went unnoticed or were misunderstood.
Collocation is an aspect of language generally considered arbitrary by nature and problematic to L2 learners who need collocational competence for effective communication. This study attempts, from the perspective of L2 learners, to have a deeper understanding of collocational use and some of the problems involved, by adopting a task based approach, using two highly comparable corpora based on the writing of Hong Kong ESL and native-speaker British students. Results of the study indicate that the performance of the Hong Kong students in collocational use might be adversely affected by their L1, L2 as well as their inadequacy in the lexis and grammar of the target language. Findings of the study suggest the need for a broader view of collocational knowledge and a pedagogical approach to the learning and teaching of this aspect of L2. The implications for teaching English in general and English vocabulary in particular are also discussed in detail.
EFL learners' mental processing of multi-word units
- P.-Y Huang
- D Wible
- C.-T Chou
Huang, P.-Y., Wible, D., & Chou, C.-T. (2012). EFL learners' mental processing
of multi-word units. English Teaching & Learning, 36(1), 129-163.
Implementing the lexical approach
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Lewis, M. (2002). Implementing the lexical approach. Boston: Thomson Heinle.