Abstract
In learning English as a foreign language (EFL) context, teachers often have limited time available to work on speaking skills and students also have few opportunities for using the target language outside the classroom. Therefore, the use of formulaic sequences (FSs), which is related to spoken vocabulary and fluency training, has been considered one of the solutions to help students in EFL settings have better command of English speaking. Formulaic sequences (FSs) is one of the terms describing the phenomenon of multiword units of language stored in long-term memory as if they are single lexical units. Although the beneficial roles of FSs have been noticed in research and pedagogical fields, limited studies have examined whether teaching EFL students FSs leads to their greater use of FSs in spontaneous speech production. Additionally, very few FSs studies dealing with enhancing speaking fluency have applied current internet technology for homework practice. Since scant research has tried to address the issue of enhancing students’ oral proficiency through the instruction of noticing and practicing the use of FS with the assistance of CALL, the current study explored the effects of teaching FSs on EFL students’ oral fluency in a blended learning environment. Along with fluency, the use of FSs and general oral performance of the students were examined. Besides, how the students perceived the effectiveness of such instruction was investigated. A quasi-experimental between-group design was adopted with two intact classes who respectively served as an experimental group (18 students) and a control group (5 students). Instructed by the same teacher, the two groups were given a four-week (more than 400 minutes) pedagogical intervention including in-class instruction and after-class reinforcement through CALL tasks (the experimental group was given exposure to two phrase lists and gave two practice speeches using items from the lists). Different instructional foci were set for the two groups: the experimental group was taught FSs while the control group was led to learn individual vocabulary words. All participants’ oral performance was assessed by a pretest and a posttest of giving a two-minute speech. Further, two questionnaires were designed to respectively look into the participants’ learning background and perceptions of learning FSs in the blended learning environment. By means of Mann-Whitney U test which compared the two groups’ gain scores from the pretest and the posttest, no statistically significant progress on oral fluency and general oral performance was found. However, when examining the participants’ use of FSs, the gain scores of FRR showed slightly statistically significant, which could be interpreted as that the experimental group remained at a similar level in this regard. The control group, in contrast, showed a regress of FSs use. Through descriptive statistics, responses obtained from the perception questionnaire indicated that the experimental group held positive attitude toward the intervention, wherein the experimental group became aware of the value of FSs as well. Three possible factors may explain the no-difference findings: different difficulty levels of speech topics (an artifact due to research design), short exposure to FSs intervention, and the participants’ lack of investment in learning FSs. Even though the current study needs to overcome many limitations to make the effects of intervention more explicit, it provides a starting point for integrating FSs instruction into a college EFL classroom in Taiwan. On the one hand, the current study demonstrates the feasibility of applying technology in company with FSs to help students gain access to practicing speaking at home. On the other, the feedback from the participants seemed to indicate the instruction as designed in the blended learning environment for teaching and practicing FSs was useful and thus supported pedagogical implications of the current study for other similar EFL contexts. These may encourage future researchers to study whether and how the instruction of formulaic sequences can help promote fluency, use of more FSs, or speaking performance in general.