Hélène Stengers

Formulaic sequences and perceived oral proficiency: putting a Lexical Approach to the test:

This study reports a small-scale experiment that was set up to estimate the extent to which (i) the use of formulaic sequences (standardized phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions) can help learners come across as proficient L2 speakers and (ii) an instructional method that emphasizes ‘noticing’of L2 formulaic sequences can help language learners add such phrases to their linguistic repertoire. Participants were 32 college students majoring in English. Over the course of 22 teaching hours they were exposed to considerable quantities of authentic listening and reading materials. During exploration of those materials, the experimental students (N = 17) were made aware of standardized word combinations, while in the control group (N = 15) the traditional grammar-lexis dichotomy was upheld. Afterwards, the participants’ oral proficiency was gauged in an interview by two blind judges. Both perceived the experimental group as more proficient than the control group. Two other blind judges counted the number of word combinations in the interviews that they considered to be formulaic sequences. Their counts correlated well with the oral proficiency ratings, which suggests that helping learners build a repertoire of formulaic sequences can be a useful contribution to improving their oral proficiency.

PRESENTING FIGURATIVE IDIOMS WITH A TOUCH OF ETYMOLOGY: MORE THAN MERE MNEMONICS

Instead of being completely arbitrary, the meaning of many idioms is ‘motivated’ by their original, literal usage. In an FLT context, this offers the possibility of presenting idioms in ways that promote insightful learning rather than ‘blind’ memorization. Associating an idiom with its etymology has been shown to enhance retention. This effect seems in accordance with Dual Coding theory, as the etymological association is likely to call up a mental image of a concrete scene which can be stored in memory alongside the verbal form. The present study explores the possibility of taking this technique beyond ‘mere’ mnemonics. We report a series of experiments that were set up with the participation of students of English in higher education. The results show that knowledge of the origin of idioms can effectively help learners comprehend their figurative meaning. Not only does the problem-solving task of inferring idiomatic meaning on the basis of etymological information appear feasible, it seems to facilitate recall, too, as predicted by Levels-of-processing theory in general. Finally, the results suggest that knowledge of the origin of certain idioms can help learners estimate whether they might be typical of informal discourse.

Does Pictorial Elucidation Foster Recollection of Idioms

Experimental evidence suggests that pictorial elucidation helps learners comprehend and remember the meaning of second language (L2) idioms. In this article we address the question whether it also helps retention of the form of idioms, i.e. their precise lexical composition. In a small-scale experiment, the meaning of English idioms was clarified to students with reference to the original, literal use of the expressions. This was done with a view to stimulating dual coding, i.e. the association of the figurative phrases with images of concrete scenes. For half of the idioms, photographs or drawings depicting those concrete scenes were added to the verbal explanations. The learners’ recollection of the content words of the expressions was subsequently gauged in a gap-fill test. Overall, the results suggest that the addition of pictorial elucidation contributes little to learners’ retention of linguistic form. Distraction by pictures may even have a detrimental effect when it comes to retaining unfamiliar and difficult words, and this seems to apply especially to learners whose learning style shows a predisposition for processing vocabulary through imagery. Insofar as our findings are transferable to vocabulary learning in general, they may call into question the rather indiscriminate and abundant use of pictorials in modern textbooks and CALL packages.

Acquisition of formulaic sequences in intensive and regular EFL programmes

This paper aims to analyse the role of time concentration of instructional hours on the acquisition of formulaic sequences in English as a foreign language (EFL). Two programme types that offer the same amount of hours of instruction are considered: intensive (110 hours/1 month) and regular (110 hours/7 months). The EFL learners under study are adults at the beginner (N=35), intermediate (N=44) and advanced levels (N=45). A group of native English speakers (N=12) served as a benchmark. The focus of this study is on the number and range of formulaic sequences the participants used while performing an oral narrative. The results of the statistical analyses show a slight advantage for the learners in the intensive programme, especially at the intermediate level, both in terms of frequency and range of formulaic sequences produced. Moreover, results suggest that there are still marked differences between even the advanced EFL learners in our sample and the native speaker benchmarks, again both in terms of number and range of formulaic sequences.

Exercises on collocations: a comparison of trial-and-error and exemplar-guided procedures

A growing body of evidence suggests that second or foreign language learners stand a lot to gain from mastering a variety of multiword units, such as idiomatic expressions and collocations. Although most of the research on this formulaic dimension of language and its relevance for language learners has so far dealt with English, there are solid grounds for believing that formulaicity is part and parcel of natural languages in general, and that pedagogues should therefore give due attention to multiword units also in other target languages than English, such as Spanish. Contemporary textbooks for language learning have started to include a focus on lexical phrases generally and on collocations in particular, albeit mostly through decontextualized exercises where learners are required in one way or another to match words that form partnerships. Often, these exercises do not first provide the learners with exemplars of the correct, intact target collocations that are to be assembled in the exercises. Instead...

Does copying idioms promote their recall

This paper reports an experiment designed to evaluate an attempt to improve the effectiveness of an existing L2 idiom-learning tool. In this tool, learners are helped to associate the abstract, idiomatic meaning of expressions such as jump the gun (act too soon) with their original, concrete meaning (e.g. associating jump the gun with the scene of a track athlete who starts running before the starting pistol is fired). This association lends concreteness to target lexis, which is known to facilitate learning (Paivio, A., & Desrochers, A. (1979). Effects of an imagery mnemonic on second language recall and comprehension. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 33, 17–28). It is a mental operation that orients the learner first and foremost to the semantic dimension of the expression, however. It does not as such engage the learner with formal properties of the expression, such as its orthography. In an effort to stimulate the latter engagement, a copy exercise was incorporated in the learning procedure. The merit of this additional exercise was evaluated by having one group of students (N= 21) study 25 idioms according to the new procedure, while a comparison group (N= 21) was given an additional meaning-oriented task instead. Recall by the two groups was compared immediately and two weeks after the treatment by means of a gap-fill test. The copy exercise was not found to promote better recall, a result we discuss with reference to levels of processing theory (Lockhart, R.S., & Craik, F.I.G. (1990). Levels of processing: A retrospective commentary on a framework for memory research. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 44, 87–112).