Formulaic Sequence(fs) Cannot Be an Umbrella Term in Sla

Abstract

The term formulaic sequence (FS) is used with a multiplicity of meanings in the SLA literature, some overlapping but others not, and researchers are not always clear in defining precisely what they are investigating, or in limiting the implicational domain of their findings to the type of formulaicity they focus on. The first part of the article provides a conceptual framework focusing on the contrast between linguistic or learner-external definitions, that is, what is formulaic in the language the learner is exposed to, such as idiomatic expressions or collocations, and psycholinguistic or learner-internal definitions, that is, what is formulaic within an individual learner because it presents a processing advantage. The second part focuses on the methodological consequences of adopting a learner-internal approach to the investigation of FSs, and examines the challenges presented by the identification of psycholinguistic formulaicity in advanced L2 learners, proposing a tool kit based on a hierarchical identification method.

Lexical Bundles in Thesis Abstracts by L1 Chinese Learners of English and U.S. Students

“…These variations include different L1s of the writers, different genres used to construct the corpora, and different sections of academic writing in the same genre. Furthermore, the identification and classification of lexical bundles is problematic (Adel & Erman, 2012;Pan et al, 2016;Myles & Cordier, 2017). However, given this reservation, in this section after reviewing answers to the research questions, we will relate the findings to previous studies, and discuss the differences and similarities.…”

To What Extent Are Multiword Sequences Associated With Oral Fluency?

“…There are generally two approaches to defining and measuring MWSs: a phraseological and a frequency‐based approach (Boers & Webb, ; Granger & Paquot, ). A phraseological approach often involves judgments of formulaicity according to a range of identification criteria, including semantic opacity of individual words comprising MWSs (e.g., kick the bucket ), phonological structure of word strings (e.g., vowel reduction, assimilation), and/or grammatical irregularity (e.g., if I were you ; Howarth, ; Myles & Cordier, ; Wood, , ; Wray, ). A major issue with this approach is that it involves a fair degree of subjectivity, which might impact on the reliability of the analysis.…”

Applying the Bundle–Move Connection Approach to the Development of an Online Writing Support Tool for Research Articles

“…In studies of lexical bundles, 4-grams are typically used because, compared with other n-grams, they present a variety of structures and functions for analysis (Cortes, 2004;Hyland, 2008). Although 4-grams that reach a particular frequency threshold in a corpus are likely to correlate with psycholinguistically real units (e.g., Tremblay, Derwing, Libben, & Westbury, 2011), the precise nature of their storage or processing has not been established (see Myles &Cordier, 2016, andSiyanova-Chanturia &Martinez, 2015, for detailed discussions). For this reason, lexical bundles should not be confused with psychologically valid units (i.e., formulaic sequences), because they are a corpus linguistic construct.…”

“…That is, using EAP corpora in specific disciplines, researchers and practitioners can systematically identify the words (e.g., Coxhead, ; Gardner & Davies, ) and multiword expressions (e.g., Ackermann & Chen, ; Durrant, ; Simpson‐Vlach & Ellis, ) used by experts in their respective academic disciplines. Among formulaic sequences (Wray, ), which is a term that covers a wide range of phraseology including multiword expressions (although see Myles & Cordier, , for a more refined construct of formulaic sequences), lexical bundles have been widely investigated in corpus‐based studies (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, ). Lexical bundles are “simply sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse” (p. 990), such as I don't know what , can I have a , and do you want to in spoken discourse, and as a result of , at the same time , and the way in which in written discourse.…”