Formulaic language encompasses expressions that are fixed in form and used in specific communicative

contexts. They're often prefabricated, meaning we store and retrieve them as whole units rather than
constructing them word-by-word. It's a pervasive feature of both spoken and written language.

Key characteristics of formulaic language:

 Fixed form: These expressions usually have a set structure that doesn't vary much.
 Non-literal meaning: The meaning of the whole expression may not be directly deduced from the
individual words.
 Attitudinal nuances: They often convey speaker attitudes and emotions.
 Communicative-pragmatic context: They're used in specific situations to achieve particular
communicative goals.

Types of formulaic language:

1. Idioms: Phrases or expressions whose meaning is not literal, e.g., "kick the bucket," "break a leg," "it's
raining cats and dogs."
2. Proverbs: Short, well-known sayings that express a general truth or piece of advice, e.g., "A bird in the
hand is worth two in the bush," "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."
3. Expletives: Words or phrases used to express strong emotions, e.g., "Oh my God," "Damn it," "Holy
crap."
4. Pause fillers: Sounds or words used to fill pauses in speech, e.g., "Like," "Um," "Uh."
5. Conversational speech formulas: Phrases used to manage conversations, e.g., "How are you?" "Nice to
meet you," "See you later."
6. Discourse markers: Words or phrases that signal the structure of a conversation, e.g., "So," "Well,"
"Anyway."

Functions of formulaic language:

 Fluency: They help speakers produce language more fluently and efficiently.
 Coherence: They create connections between ideas and maintain discourse flow.
 Pragmatic functions: They express social intentions, manage conversations, and signal attitudes.
 Social cohesion: They create a sense of belonging and shared understanding within social groups.

Source: The article "Experimental and Intervention Studies on Formulaic Sequences in a Second
Language" by Frank Boers and Seth Lindstromberg

• The article looks at intervention and experimental studies on formulaic sequences in a second language (L2)
that have come out since 2004.

Formulaicity is the use of word strings that are common in a language. Second language (L2) learners are slow
to catch up to native speakers in this area.

Drawing students' attention to formulaic sequences, encouraging them to look things up in dictionaries and use
text tools, and helping them remember certain formulaic sequences are all ideas for ways to close the gap.

• To figure out how well these methods work, researchers look at studies that were kind of like experiments and
put them to the test.

• The article talks about possible directions for more study in formulaic sequences.
• Advanced language learners, usually language majors or learners who have spent a lot of time immersed in a
second language (L2) community, know how to use formulaic processes in a way that is similar to how native
speakers do it.

• Advanced learners may know a lot of structured sequences but not use them to their full potential. Instead, they
use non-native-like sequences that they copied from their first language (L1).

Formulaic Sequences for Learning a Language

What formulaic sequences are used for

• Formulaic sequences are used for specific expressive goals, such as making references or expressing ideas,
taking an evaluative stance, facilitating social interaction, and organising discourse through function words.

• They are important parts of a person's vocabulary because they help people understand and communicate ideas
that might not get across otherwise.

Size and Quality of Vocabulary

Having an extensive vocabulary is a good way to guess how well you'll do in general.

• Learners of a second language who know a lot about multiword lexis have high rates of their proficiency.

• There is a strong link between the number of formulaic sequences that English as a foreign language (EFL)
students use in retell tasks and the scores that independent judges give them for their oral proficiency.

How Much You Know About Formulaic Sequences

• A lot of people knowing about formulaic patterns helps with understanding.

• Figurative language can be hard to understand, even when there are lots of clues in the situation.

• Learning how a polysemous word works in phrases is the same thing as learning all of its meanings or
functions.

Pros of Knowing a Lot About L2 Formulaic Sequences

• Formulaic sequences are strongly ingrained in memory, making co-text predictable and allowing
reconstruction after the fact.

• Making it easier to process means that you can pay more attention to parts of the conversation that aren't so
formulaic and are therefore less expected.

• For learners, word strings that help them understand information more quickly might not help them at all.

Figuring out how learners process functional language

How native speakers remember word sequences

• People who are native English learners store common word sequences as whole, unbroken chunks.

• These chunks can be retrieved from memory as already-made units, so the patterns don't have to be put
together word by word.
How Adults Who Are Learning a Second Language Remember Common Word Strings

• Adults who are learning a second language are less likely to have saved conventional word strings as a whole.

• Formulaic language helps with processing because certain patterns can be seen enough times that the learner
will strongly connect the words in them, which will help them remember the rest.

The Different Kinds of Formulaic Sequences

• It seems natural that some sequences are more likely to be understood as single words than others.

Eye-tracking tests that measure how fast you process information while reading silently show that not all word
strings that seem like formulas are as easy to process as others.

Experiments with People Who Speak the Language

• Tests with native speakers showed that different kinds of formulaic word strings are processed a lot faster than
controls that aren't formulaic.

• People who were not native speakers also processed the formulaic word strings much faster than the
nonformulaic control strings, but their total processing speed was always slower than that of the native speakers.

Why you need to know how to use formulaic sequences

• For a learner to get the most out of a formulaic order, they need to be very familiar with it.

• The association strength between the parts of a word affects the association strength between the parts of a
word in a good way.

Pros and Cons of Formulaic Language Processing and Fluency in Language Production

• Formulaic language processing advantage: No matter what their MI scores are, learners are better at
understanding high-frequency strings.

• Difference in how much learners are exposed to low-frequency but highly linked word pairs: learners are better
at processing high-frequency strings.

• People who aren't native speakers: Learners don't seem to be able to process idioms faster than nonnatives
because they aren't as familiar with less common common phrases.

• The figurative nature of idioms: native speakers understand idioms quickly because they can connect groups of
words to their symbolic meaning.

• Learners don't avoid activating the literal meaning(s) of component words: Learners don't avoid activating the
literal meaning(s) of component words.

• Formulaic sequences: These help language learners sound like they speak the language naturally. Studies have
shown that the use of formulaic sequences in L2 narratives is related to higher proficiency rates and fluency
scores.

Mistakes in how learners use formulaic sequences: When learners make mistakes in how they use formulaic
sequences, it lowers their speaking proficiency scores.
• Challenge for learning: to get the most out of formulaicity, students need to know a lot of different things in-
depth.

Using text-chunking to learn about formulaic language awareness

• Text chunking is when students highlight or underline groups of words in real texts that they think are made up
of more than one word.

• The chunks are compared to those of other students or to those chosen by the teacher.

• Text chunking has been shown to make the stories that students in the chunking treatment group write more
predictable.

• But this is because students used more exact word groups from the new book.

• There was no difference in the uptake of formulaic patterns between groups that regularly chunked text and
those that didn't.

• Some ways to make English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students more aware of formulaic language are to
point out sequences in texts, talk about how useful they are for EAP writing, use concordance lines to look into
how they are used, and use the sequences they come across in their own writing assignments again and again.

• It wasn't clear how the course affected the students' ability to remember formulaic sequences; their end-of-
course writings didn't have more formulaic sequences than those written by the control group.

There isn't any evidence that raising awareness leads to more learning of formulaic language. This is likely
because noticing a set of words just once or twice isn't enough to leave lasting memory marks.

• A student needs to have seen and thought about a word sequence at least two times before they can tell that it is
a recurring one.

• One possible answer is to change the input so that certain formulaic sequences are made more readable by
adding extra text, like underlining. But it hasn't been proven for sure what effect this kind of literary
enhancement has on learning new words by incident.

A study on how to remember formulaic sequences

• Peters (2012) found that text-based improvements to glossed formulaic patterns help second language learners
remember them better.

• The study shows that second language learners probably won't notice or pay attention to formulaic patterns
unless they are pointed out by the teacher or the person writing the materials.

• Students often copy single words they don't know instead of the whole formulaic order in which these words
appear.

• Flooding the input, or making sure that the same sequence appears several times in a short amount of speech,
has been suggested as a way to get independent learners to remember formulaic sequences.

• The study by Webb, Newton, and Chang found that the more often a phrase is used, the more likely it is to be
remembered on the posttests. Even though there were as many as 15 meetings in such a short amount of time,
none of the posttests were guaranteed to be passed.

• If a learner isn't focused on the text itself, collocations may stick out in their mind more.
• Webb and Kagimoto (2009) found that reading vs. copying did not make a difference in how well the two
learning situations worked overall. The mean score on the harder test of remembering all the collocations was
29%, which is not as good as the results from Durrant and Schmitt (2010).

Getting people to remember what they've learned about words

Conditions for Incidental and Intentional Learning

• Instance-based learning happens when people aren't told directly to remember target words.

• In intentional learning situations, you are told directly to remember certain words.

Some examples of incidental learning

• Peters (2009) and Webb and Kagimoto (2011) looked at advanced English language learners who read a book
with glossaries that explained what words and phrases that were underlined meant.

• Between the pre-test and post-test, both groups made nice progress, but there was no difference between them.

• The work of learning is made harder when there are words in a set that have similar meanings.

How to Learn and Remember Collocations

• Studies have shown that learning a new word with a combination helps you remember it at least as well as
learning the new word by itself.

• Once the pair of words has been learned, the word that was already known can help you remember the new
word that goes with it.

Processing your thoughts to remember things

Laufer and Girsai (2008) chose contrastive analysis and translation as a way to get students to think about L2
English collocations.

• Three groups of EFL students read a text with 10 single words and 10 collocations that they had not known
before the reading.

• In both tests, the contrastive analysis group did much better than the other two groups.

• The method used for the post-test—making translations—may have given the group that learned the questions
through translations an advantage.

Sound repetition in formulaic sequences can help you remember things.

• Lindstromberg and Boers (2005) and Lindstromberg and Boers (2008a, 2008b) looked into how drawing
learners' attention to sound repetition in formulaic patterns can help them remember things.

• People remembered alliteration, rhyme, and assonance better than collocations that didn't use alliteration.

• The ability of alliteration and assonance to help people remember things may be task-induced rather than built
into the stimulus sentences.
• A study by Boers, Lindstromberg, and Eyckmans (2012) found that alliterative cues were much better at
helping people remember things.

• Repetition of sounds is a big part of how words fit together and how formulaic processes are made.

• The ability to picture certain types of formulaic patterns, especially figurative idioms, has been looked into
more than the ability to repeat sounds.

• The dual coding theory says that it's easier to remember concrete words than abstract words.

The goal of cognitive semantics methods is to make idioms easier to picture by showing students how groups of
phrases use common metaphor themes or come from the same place.

• Mime, drawings, or pictures are often used in intervention studies that are based on cognitive semantics.

• Putting sets of words together based on metaphors helps you remember them.

• The same recall rates were seen when idioms were grouped together based on the word they shared.

• Going over the precise meaning of an idiom again seems to help people remember it better.

• The presence of pictures may keep students from giving enough attention to the shape of words they don't
know yet.

The use of cognitive semantics to teach prepositional and phrasal verbs

• According to cognitive semantics, terms like "Good IS UP" and "KNOWN IS OUT" are like metaphors.

Choose the right word for phrasal and prepositional verbs to help you learn.

• Figurative phrases, on the other hand, work better than this method.

Formulaic sequences and how they affect learners' lexicon

• The main goal of intervention studies is to help students learn new types of formulaic patterns.

• Not many studies have looked into ways to help people learn more about formulaic processes, like learning
how they can and can't be used.

• Knowing what action verbs mean in their direct sense helps students understand how they can be used in
figurative language.

Proceduralization to Improve Fluency

• There aren't many intervention studies that look at how to use procedures to improve speech.

• Repeating a task and practicing it can help you speak more fluently.

• Memorising long chunks of text word-for-word can help you remember formulaic patterns.

• Memorising whole texts has been shown to be a good way to teach.

Learning and Getting Good at Formulaic Sequences

Things that affect getting a formulaic sequence

• Key factors in learning conventional sequences are the number of times they happen and how useful they are
thought to be.

• Sequences that are partially clear are more likely to be recognised than sequences that are fully clear.

Also, fixed expressions are seen as formulaic units more quickly than changeable expressions.

• Repeating sounds within words in a regular way is a relatively easy way to remember them.

Putting learning of formulaic sequences first

• There are different ways to learn different kinds of formulaic routines.

• Different kinds of sequences need different kinds of teaching help.

Making students more aware of formulaicity

• Studies have not found proof of this change in how well students can use formulaic sequences on their own.

• Adding pictures to words that use formulaic sequences can help people understand them better.

Increasing the accuracy of formulaic sequences

• There are also a lot of mistakes with collocations when it comes to function words.

Formula-oriented methods of teaching a second language have many benefits.

• Formula-based ways of teaching a second language may work better for some types of language.

• When teaching a language with a lot of accent, you might need a method that is based on formulas and pays
more attention to form.

What Exercises in Textbooks Do

• It doesn't help much to do exercises in textbooks that give you different parts of collocations to match.

• Memorising text word-for-word is a good way to learn formulaic routines, especially for improving fluency.

How formulaic sequences in a second language help students feel confident and communicate

• Knowing formulaic patterns in a second language helps students feel more confident and ready to talk to
others.

Source: Alzheimer's Disease and Formulaic Language

• Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an illness that damages nerve cells and makes it hard to think clearly and
communicate.

• People who have this sickness are known to use less productive language, which shows up in their
conversations as a smaller vocabulary.
• Syntax is seen as a part of language that has been kept mostly the same in AD, though there is still some
disagreement.

• A lot of everyday language use is made up of fixed expressions like idioms, pause-fillers, conversational
speech formulas, and other phrases that only a local speaker knows.

• People in the late stages of AD often say standard phrases like "Excuse me" and "It's nice to see you again"
with normal fluency, giving the idea that they can hold a conversation.

• Formulaic language makes up a big part of expressive language; 24% of speaking speech is thought to be
made up of it.

• Studies show that people with damage to their left hemisphere use conventional language a lot, but people with
damage to their right hemisphere use it less.

• People with AD are pretty good at making formulaic statements, which makes the semantic content of AD
language less rich.

• Keeping track of the use of formulaic language in AD speech could help create a more true language profile
for this group.

• Past research has shown that basal ganglia strokes make it much harder to use formulas. This suggests that
subcortical cells play a part in normal function.

• Proof that formulaic language is still used in AD could support a two-part model of language: left hemisphere
influence on new language, and right hemisphere-subcortical circuits play a big role in formulaic expressions.

A study of formulaic language in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD)

The study's goal was to find out how Alzheimer's Disease (AD) affects formulaic language by looking at how
much formulaic language is used.

• The results back up what doctors have seen and the idea that people with AD use more formal language than
healthy adults.

• There were no big changes in the number of formulaic expressions between the early and late onset groups,
even though their ages were very different.

• The study doesn't back up the idea that people with early-onset AD have worse language skills.

• According to the study, the basal ganglia may play a part in action forms and ordering based on procedural
memory, which could explain why formulaic language is still used in AD.

• Formulaic language may be overused by people with AD, which could explain other linguistic traits that are
unique to this group, like semantic deficiency or the empty speech that is described for AD. • Formulaic
utterances are common in healthy speech, but only make up about 25% of all talk, compared to 35% in the AD
groups.

• Figuring out the difference between new and repeated words is important for diagnosing and treating language
disorders.

• Figuring out if a person with AD uses formulaic phrases too much or only sometimes is important for figuring
out how well they can communicate and giving them and their families good advice.

Source: To what extent do native and non-native writers make use of collocations? By PHILIP
DURRANT AND NORBERT SCHMITT
They look at how non-native writers use word pairs and strong collocations and compare them to how native
speakers normally do it. Native writers use more low-frequency combinations, while non-native writers use very
high t-score collocations at least as much as native writers. Non-native writers also tend to use the same
collocations over and over, which shows that they like using them a lot. This goes against the idea that non-
native writers mostly work from words to phrases, or "bottom up."

But the study also shows that non-native writing is missing something when it comes to the way words are used.
It seems like people don't use enough collocations with high mutual information scores, which means they are
unique to each other and include less common collocations. This trend fits with earlier study that found that
learners quickly pick up collocations that are used a lot, but it takes longer to learn less common but strongly
linked items.

The study shows that advanced non-native phraseology is different from native phraseology not because it
avoids formulaic language, but because it uses too many high-frequency collocations and not enough low-
frequency pairs that are strongly associated. This might be what makes people think that writing by people who
are not native speakers lacks "idiomaticity." But you don't need to come up with a different way to learn a
second language to explain this lack. Based on this trend, language teachers might want to pay attention to
collocations that get high mutual information scores in a target language corpus.

Source: Incidental Learning of Collocation by Stuart Webb, Jonathan Newton, Anna Chang
Incidental Learning of Collocation: A Study on Second Language Acquisition
Understanding Incidental Vocabulary Learning
• Majority of first language (L1) words are learned incidentally.
• Incidental vocabulary learning should be part of any L2 vocabulary learning program.
• Words are gradually learned through repeated encounters in context.
• More often unknown words are encountered, the more likely they are to be learned.

Collocation Learning
• Research indicates that a large proportion of language is made up of multiword units.
• Up to 70% of language is made up of fixed expressions, with the number of collocations far outnumbering the
number of single-word items.
• Collocations can be learned effectively through explicit teaching.
• Little research has been published on incidental learning of collocation through meaning-focused input.

Defining Collocation
• Collocation is defined from a statistical standpoint, referring to the regular co-occurrence of words within a
given span.
• Statistical strength of occurrence is indicated by measures such as mutual information scores, t scores, and log-
likelihood.
• This approach allows researchers to quickly identify collocates for a word.
• The study includes highly transparent collocations, less transparent collocations, and semantically opaque
collocations.
• The inclusive approach eliminates a subjective component in the design that can lead to varying interpretations
between studies of what is and what is not a collocation.

Understanding Collocations in L2 Language Learning

Collocations in L2 Learning
• L2 learners recognize and use fewer collocations but make greater use of familiar ones than L1 learners.
• L2 learners' knowledge of collocations is less than that of single-word items, potentially leading to learner
errors in language production.
• Few studies focus on explicit learning of collocations, which can be learned using glossed sentences, cloze
tasks, concordancers, contrastive analysis and translation, a cognitive linguistics approach using imagery, and
sound patterns like alliteration.

Incidental Learning of Collocations

• Durrant and Schmitt (2010) found that the number of sentences read aloud that included targeted adjective-
noun collocations had an effect on learning the form of the collocations.
• Repetition may have an effect on learning collocations incidentally, similar to single-word items.

Methodological Issues in L2 Collocational Learning

• Most collocations do not occur very often; they are less frequent than the most frequent word within the
collocations.
• The lower frequency of encounters with collocations increases the likelihood that knowledge gained through
each encounter might be forgotten.
• The frequency of multiword items also varied between spoken and written discourse, making research on
incidental learning of collocations problematic.

Incidental Learning of Collocation: A Study of Form and Meaning

• Vocabulary learning studies often focus on learning form and meaning, neglecting incidental learning of
collocation.
• Measuring knowledge of collocations' form and meaning is challenging due to varying transparency of
collocations.
• The degree of transparency varies from person to person and between learners of different language
backgrounds.
• To measure incidental learning of transparent collocations, the collocations need to be made up of unknown
words, which is infrequent and not feasible to measure within a short period without modifying materials.
• The same problem applies to semantically opaque collocations, as they are not frequently used and their
meanings are likely to be transparent.
• Knowledge of collocation form or composition is critical to productive language use, improving accuracy and
fluency.
• Studies should measure knowledge of form to determine learners' ability to recognize and produce collocation
forms, and receptive and productive knowledge of form and meaning to determine their link to their meanings.

Incidental Learning of Single-Word Items and Collocations

Incidental Learning of Single-Word Items
• Single-word items are learned incidentally through reading by both L1 and L2 learners.
• Research indicates that more encounters with an unknown word in context increase its form and meaning
learning.
• Rott (1999) found that six encounters may be enough to learn words, Horst et al. (1998) found that eight
encounters may be necessary, and Waring and Takaki (2003) suggested that it may take more than 20
encounters to incidentally learn words.

Impact of Contextual Information

• Some contexts provide useful information, while others provide little or misleading information about the
meaning of words.
• Differences between findings may be due to the amount of information in the contexts for each encounter and
the test format used.

Collocation Learning Incidentally

• Research indicates that knowledge of collocation may be gained incidentally through reading.
• Webb (2007) tested L2 learners on their ability to recognize and produce acceptable collocates for nonsense
words they encountered in sentences.
• Increased encounters with nonsense words led to significantly greater collocational knowledge.

Repetition and Learning Form of Collocations

• Repeated encounters with collocations had a significant effect on learning the form of collocations.
• The mean scores for version 1 increased by 3.06 words or 27% of the unknown items, while the mean scores
for version 5 increased by 3.66 collocations (33%).
• The difference between Group 5 and the control group indicates that 5 or more encounters with collocations
may be necessary to incidentally learn the form of collocations.

Incidental Learning of Collocation Test Results

• The productive test of form did not measure productive knowledge of form on the pretest.
• Version 15 (9.97%) and version 10 (5.33) significantly higher scores than other versions.
• The study suggests that greater than 15 encounters may be necessary for effective learning of productive
knowledge of form.
• Repetition may significantly affect learning the form and meaning of collocations incidentally.
• Participants who read and heard version 15 had significantly higher scores on both the productive and
receptive tests of form and meaning.
• Lower scores on the productive test of form and meaning indicate increased difficulty in gaining productive
knowledge of collocation.
• The immediate posttest scores are high compared to Waring and Takaki’s (2003) study of single-word items.
• Factors contributing to this difficulty include prior knowledge of the form and meaning of collocations,
learning through reading while listening, and a test order effect.

Understanding the Learning of Collocations

• Collocations' form and meaning significantly influence their learning.
• Some collocations are harder to derive but can still be understood through knowledge of individual items.
• Presenting collocations in multiple contexts aids the learning process.
• Learners may already know the form and meaning of some target collocations, which may increase scores.
• Reading while listening leads to greater incidental vocabulary learning than reading.
• Collocations are likely to be heard without pauses or hesitations between items, providing some indication of
their form.
• The translation format may have contributed to knowledge of the collocations.
• Measuring the form and meaning of collocations is difficult due to transparency of meaning and degree of
congruence.
• Noncongruent collocations made up of unknown words or nonsense words may be more accurate.
• The study's ecological validity may decrease as learning collocation occurs as learners increase their depth of
knowledge for known words.

Pedagogical Implications
• Incorporating useful collocations in graded reading schemes may reduce the need to teach collocations
explicitly.
• Selection of target collocations should be based on the individual items that make up the collocations and the
frequency level of the collocations in language.
• High-frequency collocations can be used as a starting point.
• Teachers can include target collocations in their classroom speech, raising awareness of target collocations and
deepening students’ knowledge of known words.

Source: Effectiveness of second language collocation instruction_ A meta analysis

• The study looks into how well teaching collocations helps students learn them in a second language.
• The results show that the solution works very well.
• The methods used in the intervention determine how well it works, but the number of sessions, the total length
of the intervention, and the end measures may not have an effect.
• This means that when teaching second language collocations, the ways of intervention are more important than
the level of intensity.
Vocabulary courses that teach words in a clear way work better.
- The study data do not allow us to figure out the best level of intervention intensity.