Pre-Service English Teachers' Awareness of Formulaic Language Use: Implications for Language Instruction

Abstract

The present paper aimed to explore pre-service English teachers’ awareness of formulaic language use. The study involved 41 senior students who were enrolled in the English Language Teaching Department at a state university in Turkey. Data of this cross-sectional study was collected through a formulaic language awareness form, which included three main parts. Firstly, participants were asked to write down three words that come to their mind concerning formulaic expressions, and their own definition of formulaic expressions. Secondly, they were required to place given formulaic expressions into the correct group on Kecskes’s Continuum Table. Finally, they were asked to identify formulaic expressions from a given text. Content and descriptive analysis were used to analyse the data and reveal the awareness of formulaic expressions among pre-service English teachers. The results indicated that the participants were somewhat familiar with the concept of formulaic expressions. They were able to identify grammatical units, phrasal verbs, and idioms, but struggled with identifying and grouping other fixed expressions. They also had difficulties classifying formulaic expressions and mis-grouped them. As a result, the study found that pre-service English teachers’ awareness of formulaic language use was moderate.