Effects of focused instruction of formulaic sequences on fluent expression in second language narratives: A case study

Abstract

While knowledge of what constitutes fluent speech has developed over the past several decades, it is still unclear how language teachers can facilitate its acquisition by second language learners. Fluency is generally accepted as being a function of temporal variables of speech such as rate of speaking and the number of words or syllables uttered between hesitations. A considerable amount of evidence exists that formulaic sequences, multi-word phenomena such as collocations, idioms, phrasal verbs and so on, play a role in the production of fluent speech. The present study is an investigation into the effects of focused instruction of formulaic sequences and fluency on the performance of a Japanese learner of English in spontaneous narratives in English. Results indicate a strong increase in fluency after six weeks of focused instruction, and a relationship between the instruction and the fluency and use of formulaic sequences in the learner speech samples.

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