Formulaic language
Jonathon Ryan
Recent posts in this series by Michael and Maria have looked at teaching idioms and phrasal verbs using video clips from Chasing Time English drama series. This week, let’s zoom out a little to the wider concept of formulaic language, which encompasses both idioms and phrasal verbs, alongside other concepts including collocations, lexical phrases, proverbs, pragmatic formulas, metaphors, and lexical bundles. In other words, any sequence of words that is deployed as a chunk, rather than generated on the fly by applying rules of syntax and morphology. Things like ‘nice to see you’ and ‘it's raining cats and dogs.’ Our anthropologist friends would also point out that the concept goes even further, into categories such as chants, nursery rhymes, incantations and spells. For instance, Europeans in the 16th and 17th century believed in spells that only worked if recited word for word (Thomas, 1971). These latter categories are completely irrelevant to language teaching, but this expanded notion of formulaic language clarifies that the concept operates at various levels of discourse granularity, from pairs of words to much larger texts.
Over recent years, with the upswing in corpus linguistic, it has also become increasingly clear that that a lot of our day-to-day language includes formulaic elements. Yes, we construct original sentences all the time, but very often these are composed of formulaic chunks. For instance, ‘I really wanna play the drums’ can be thought of as the chunk ‘I really wanna’ and the chunk ‘play the drums’, tied together with a little syntax (‘want to’ + bare verb).
However, the argument for teaching formulaic language is not just about its utility. Formulaic language—while seemingly difficult—is actually your friend as a second language learner: once a reusable chunk has been firmly embedded in memory, it can be reproduced fluently with very little effort. It frees up our limited language processing resources and often feels suitably colloquial.
One handbrake on formulaic language is that it is generally less pervasive (and appropriate) in writing than in speaking. The exception is perhaps legal documents, which often have boilerplate passages (terms and conditions, etc.), but an essay is off to a very bad start when the writer uses a trite saying like ‘there are two sides to the coin’ or ‘the knife cuts both ways’—both of which appear too often in student work. Shorter patterns, such as collocations and phrasal verbs are used very widely.
With this in mind, the following activity practices a combination of sentence stems (e.g. ‘I was just wondering …’) and pragmatic formulas (e.g. ‘How’s it going?’), all drawn from Episode 1 of the Chasing Time English series ‘Days Crossing’.
An example activity
The following activity is based on CTE series ‘Days Crossing’, where the following 15 sentence stems and pragmatic formulas all appear in Episode 1:
I just wanted to say …
I was just wondering …
How’re ya?
What’s this?
Is that everything?
Have a nice day
You too
How’s it going?
Is there any chance I could …
Keep an eye on it
I’ll be back soon
I don’t think so
What are you up to?
What are you doing?
Glad you like it
As an initial activity, prior to viewing the episode, prepare a bingo card for each student, each containing six of these formulaic phrases. As students hear the phrases on their card, they should tick them off, crying ‘Bingo!’ when the last one arises. The trick is to ensure that every student’s card includes the final phrase ‘Glad you like it’, which occurs at the end of the episode.
As a follow up, divide students into five groups and give each group three of the phrases to work with. Model the pronunciation of the phrases at a natural speed and with the usual phonological characteristics of casual speech. For homework, students should research at least one of their expressions and how it is used. A google search will provide some examples in context. If they are studying in an English-speaking country, they could ask informants for ways to complete the sentence stem or contexts suitable for the pragmatic formular. Follow up in class the next day.
Reference
Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Weidenfeld & Nicholson.