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FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS USED BY TEACHERS IN THE

CLASSROOM
(A Case Study in Mondial Schools in Academic Year of 2014/2015)
Citra Putri Utami
Citrautami2110@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
This study is motivated by the fact that the primary goal of teaching and learning
English is Communicative Competence. One of the components to form
communicative competence is formulaic competence that enables the students to
encounter nature language in the communication. Another fact is that children tend to
imitate what language they hear that according to Vygotskys interactionist theory,
that is a social learning process and there is also an individual learning process that
the children learn the language they hear and automatically use it to communicate.
Therefore, teachers play an important role to support the social learning process by
having the interaction to students as they also give the comprehensible input from the
language they use.
This study is focused on teachers formulaic competence. It investigates
formulaic expressions (FEs) used by teachers in the classroom in the context of
immersion and the frequency of FEs occurrence displayed by the teachers.
This case study was conducted at Mondial Schools. The participants of the
study were two teachers. Audio and video recording were used to collect data. The
analyses of the data were done based on Hughes (1981:9) for analyzing the language
functions of the teachers utterances and Biber et al. (1999) for analyzing FEs
occurred in the teachers talk.
The results show that the two teachers used all types of FEs in the interaction
with students. MWUs were mostly used as the imperative clauses in the form of
phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs. Collocations mostly occurred in the form of
adjectives and nouns collocations. Inserts mostly used in the form of discourse
markers. Binomial expression such as listen and watch them! was also used to give
command. Lexical bundles were mostly used in the form of wh-question fragments
which mostly began with what. Another result is that the teachers showed greater
productivity on three types of FEs; lexical bundles (203), inserts (196), and
collocations (166) and produced less MWUs (30), idiomatic phrases (7), and
binomial expressions (14).

Keywords: communicative competence, formulaic competence,


Interactionist Theory, formulaic expressions, teacher talk.

Vygotskys

INTRODUCTION
The study investigates formulaic expressions used by teachers in the classroom in the
context of immersion and the frequency of formulaic expressions occurrence
displayed by the teachers. This study is motivated by the fact that the primary goal of
teaching and learning English is Communicative Competence which is aimed to
enable the students to be fluent and accurate to create texts based on the context.
There are many components that form communicative competence. One of the
components is formulaic competence that enables the students to encounter nature
language in the communication. That competence refers to those fixed and
prefabricated chunks of language that the native speakers use in everyday
interactions such as collocations, idioms, lexical frames and routines. In creating a
spoken text in communication, chunks have a great deal to help the students to use
language appropriately since it is grammatical and have a suitable deixis to use also.
As it is stated by Widdowson (1989:135) that:
communicative competence is not a matter of knowing rules for the
composition of sentences and being able to employ such rules to assemble
expressions from scratch as and when occasion requires. It is much more a
matter of knowing a stock of partially pre-assembled patterns, formulaic
frameworks, and a kit of rules, so to speak, and being able to apply the rules
to make whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual
standards.

Another fact is that children tend to imitate what language they hear, learn the
language they hear, and automatically use it to communicate. According to Vygotsky,
every function in the childs cultural development appears twice: first, on the social
level, and later on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and
then inside the child (intrapsychological). Mediation is the central of Vygotskys
theory that the concepts show how the child is moved from social level to individual
level of learning. The concepts are internalization, participation, and memory (Smidt,
2009: 28). Internalization is where the children become the part of a community and

share with the adults. Participation is where the children have a kind of stimulus
given by the adults to communicate such as to share their ideas and express their
feeling. Memory is where the input the children get from the environment including
the language used by the adults absorbed. Thus, the presence of adults to support
childrens learning play an important role.
The area in which the students need the interaction from teachers called Zone
of Proximal Development (ZPD) where the most powerful form of learning takes
place (Thompson, 2013). ZPD explains that the language acquisition is accomplished
through teachers guidance and collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky and
Bruner, 2000). Therefore, teachers strive to continue to build up the classroom
interaction through learning experience to encourage children to stay in practice. A
guidance, support, and aid from teachers are very useful to achieve the desired
expression emerged in the interaction and so that will give the students
comprehensible input on how to use the language.
This study needs to be carried out because having the formulaic competence
for both teacher and student is important. The students absolutely need to learn
grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation to be able to create text appropriately in the
communication. There are two kinds of communication; communication in spoken
and written text. This study is presented to know the formulaic expressions in the
spoken language used by teachers to interact with students. By understanding the
formulaic language, students will automatically learn grammar and the vocabulary to
use to communicate. A teacher who is a pedagogical support for students
automatically will be a model of how to use the language and the students will adapt
the language used by teachers. To support that opinion, Mercer and Fisher (1992:
342) in Corden (2000) claim that the factor in determining childrens learning
potential will be nature of discourse and the quality of the teachers intervention.
In Indonesia, nowadays there are some schools adopt immersion programs. In
Semarang, Mondial Education adopts an early immersion program within pre-school
years until primary school years. In the context of immersion school, both teachers
and students use English in everyday interactions. They are demanded to use English
actively in any situation when they are at school aiming at forming English as a
habit. As cited by Sadiyah (2013) that Met (1993) defines immersion program as a
method of foreign language instruction in which the regular school curriculum is
taught through the medium of the language. In this program nearly all instruction is
in English, and there is little or no use of other languages. According to that, the

teachers who are non- native speakers of English strive to improve students' spoken
language to communicate by engaging the students in the interaction in order to
stimulate the receptivity and the willingness of the students to encounter the
language in a daily communication.
There are many kinds of learning experiences and one of them is play-based
learning. It is considered as the way to emerge the classroom interaction. During the
activity of play- based learning, there will be a lot of expressions displayed by both
teachers and students that will indicate the natural communication. In using some
expressions to communicate, the students of primary school typically use the simple
utterances. It is the challenge for the teachers to develop their skill. Moreover the
teachers are non- native speakers and have no experiences in living in English
Speaking Countries. So, the issue about the language used by the teachers to
communicate with the students who are still in the early age is interesting.
Therefore, this study is conducted to provide the information about the
formulaic expressions used by teachers in the classroom to a betterment of early
childhood education.
Teacher Talk Based on Glyn Hughes
According to Hughes (1981), there are various language functions probably emerge
in Teacher Talk such as aiming at organizing the class which contains of the action of
giving instructions, sequencing the classroom activity, and supervision. Besides,
there is also language function related to interrogation such as asking questions to
encourage the students to share their opinion or thought or stimulate a conversation
that has a genuine communicative purposes. Another language functions related to
explanation such as to give the factual information, verbal commentary to
accompany a picture or any other media to explain the materials, or to paraphrasing
and summarizing. Last, the language functions related to the interaction such as
giving affective attitudes to the students like express an anger, surprise, appreciation,
sympathy, etc. In addition, teachers usually have a kind of social ritual related to
reccurrent social situation such as greeting, apologizing, thanking, congratulatin etc.
Formulaic Expressions Defined by the Experts
Wray (2008:9) defines formulaic expressions as the sense that certain words have an
especially strong relationship with each other in creating their meaning. He further

explains the working definition which is related to the identification of the


formulaicity, that is, formulaic sequences. Formulaic sequence is defined as a
sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements, which
is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at
the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language
grammar. (Wray, 2008:94)
Wood (2009) that he defines formulaic expressions as fixed strings or chunks
of words that have a range of functions and uses in speech production and
communication which are processed mentally as if single words. He then explained
that the functions of formulaic expressions are used as they can (a) convey denotative
meaning either as idioms or highly frequent lexical collocations with fixed order; (b)
convey structure information; (c) perform speech acts; (d) provide more evidence );
(e) serve as topic opening or topic-closing moves; (f) be used in honorifics or social
conventions of face; or (g) convey affective content.
Celce-Murcias (2007) defines the formulaic expressions as fixed or
prefabricated chunks that heavily used in everyday interactions. These structures
include: routines (fixed phrases like of course and formulaic chunks like How do you
do? Im fine, thanks. How are you?); collocations (verb object: spend money, adverbadjective: statistically significant, and adjective-noun: tall building); idioms (to kick
the bucket =to die); lexical frames (See you later/tomorrow/ next week).
Type of Formulaic Expressions According to Biber et al. (1999)
There are many types of formulaic expressions in the Biber et al.s theory: Multiword units (MWUs), collocations, idiomatic phrases, binomial expressions, inserts,
and lexical bundles.
(1) MWUs are the single semantic units that the meaning cannot be derived from
the individual words. They can be in a form of phrasal verbs such as pick up;
prepositional verbs such as look for; phrasal-prepositional verbs such as look
forward to; or other form such as take a look (at).
(2) Collocations consist of independent words that tend to co-occur (Biber et al.,
1999:59). For example, the adjectives broad and wide are found in different
collocations even they have the same meaning. We cannot say broad area or
broad selection but the word wide is the correct word to combine with
collocates area and selection.
(3) Idiomatic Phrases are the expressions with a meaning not entirely derivable
from the meaning of their parts and can represent many different kinds of
structural units (Biber et al.,1999:1024). There are two categories of

idiomatic phrases according to Biber et al. (1999:1025): verb+prepositional


phrase idioms such as fall in love, and verb+noun phrase idioms such as kick
the bucket.
(4) According to Biber et al. (1999:1030), binomial phrases consist of two words
from the same grammatical category, coordinated by and or or such as fish
and chips, mum and dad, go and get,etc.
(5) Inserts can be categorized as formulaic expressions since it has implicit
meaning either it is a word (single morpheme) like yes, no, please, okay, etc.
or word string (invariable lexicalized sequence) like you know, I mean, thank
you, etc.
(6) Biber et al. (2004) classified the structural characteristics of bundles into
three types: lexical bundles that incorporate verb phrase fragments (e.g. you
dont have to, its going to be, I mean you know, are you going to,what do you
think), lexical bundles that incorporate dependent clause fragments (e.g. I
dont want you to, what I want to, if you want to, to be able to, that there is
a) and lexical bundles that incorporate noun phrase and prepositional phrase
fragments (e.g. one of the things, a little bit about, at the end of, as far as)
METHODS OF INVESTIGATION
In conducting the study, I used qualitative research since the focus of doing this
research is to observe the participants behavior during their engagement in activities
to know the types of formulaic expressions emerged in the teachers talk. The type of
data used in this study is qualitative audio and visual material.
The data were taken in the form of videotapes consisting conversations
transcript between the teachers and the students in the classroom of grade 3 of
Mondial Schools in Semarang. The quantitative data is only about the frequency of
occurrence of each type of formulaic expressions in teachers talk to the extent to
enhance the qualitative analysis of the study.
The data collection in this study involves four stages as suggested by
Creswell (2014:190). First, I identified the purposefully selected sites or individuals
to be the objects of study. The next step was deciding the number of participants. I
took two teachers as the sources of my data. Then, I collected the qualitative data
that consist of qualitative audio and visual materials. All the data obtained from those
steps were transcribed.
The data were analyzed after getting the audio and video recordings. The first
step was preparing the transcript which was presented in a form of a table. The next
step was reading or looking at the data and trying to make the general thoughts about
the data collected. After that, I started coding the data. In case of the present study, I

classified the teachers talk into the language functions based on Hughes (1981:9)
and then into the types of formulaic expressions based on Biber et al. (1999). As this
study focused on the teachers talk, the students speech production were not
analyzed. The next step is calculating how many formulaic expressions in each of
types appeared in order to find the frequency of occurrence and then the result was
displayed into a table of occurrence.
The data interpretation was conducted through several stages. The first step
of interpreting the data is telling the frequency of the types of formulaic expressions
produced by the teachers. After that, the data were then interpreted based on the
literature review mentioned in chapter 2. The classroom context concerning the topic
of the lesson and the activities provided by the teachers was described clearly to
accompany the excerpts of the formulaic expressions found.
RESULT OF THE STUDY
The table shows the type of FEs emerged in teachers talk as well as their frequency
of occurrence.
Types of Fes

Occurrence of
Teachers
production

Multi word units (MWUs)

30

Phrasal and prepositional verbs (PP)

26

Complex prepositions (CP)

Correlative coordinators (CC)

Complex subordinators (CS)

Multi-word verb constructions

Collocations

166

Adjectives Nouns

41

Nouns Verbs

27

Noun Noun

36

Verbs Preposition

15

Verbs Adverbs

Verbs Adjectives

Adverbs Adjectives

12

Adverbs Adverbs

Collocations in prepositional phrases

25

Idiomatic phrases

Binomial expressions

14

Noun and/or noun

Adjective and/or adjective

Verb and/or verb

Inserts

196

Greetings and farewell

Discourse marker

85

Response elicitors

Response form

64

Polite formulae

37

Vocatives

Lexical Bundles (LB)

205

Lexical bundles that incorporate verb phrase


fragments (LB- type 1)

146

Lexical bundles that incorporate dependent

clause fragments (LB- type 2)

52

Lexical bundles that incorporate noun phrase


and prepositional phrase fragments (LB-type 3)
7

It can be seen from the table that the teachers used all types of FEs. Those
FEs were almost used by teachers in every utterance to interact with the students.
The most frequent FEs used were lexical bundles, inserts, and collocations because
they were used more than 150 times compare to other types, for instance MWU (30
times), idiomatic phrases (7 times) and binomial expressions (14 times). In the
classroom situation, the teachers tried to encourage students participation by giving
questions so there would be lexical bundles in the form of wh-question fragment and
yes-no question fragment such as what do you know about, what is the, anyone
knows?, any questions?.
By giving those questions, automatically the teachers also gave the feedback
towards students answers as well as gave the appreciation such as by saying thats a
good idea. More, the teacher often added the explanation about some factual
information. Inside the explanation, there were some bundles, such as we can be
easily sick if to express cause and effect; there is a to mention an object; when it
is going to which is a bundle as dependent clause and many kinds of that refers to
a bundle incorporate with noun phrase.
Besides that, FE also often exists with functional grammar as directive or
imperative meaning/giving order because the teacher implemented various content of
learning that involved students participation so the teachers actively gave
instructions as guidance. There are several examples in this case. The teachers used
idiomatic phrase and collocation lets read first., take a look at to direct pupils
attention to the whiteboard or the textbook. I want you to and You dont need to
are commands in the form of declarative clause. Can you please repeat has insert
please which is to assist imperative clause as polite formulae or discourse marker,
or in six word bundle what you have to do is. Another example is the imperative
clauses in multi-words units such as come on that was said by teacher to encourage
students to speak and listen up is to warn the students who were not serious in
following the lesson.
Idiomatic phrases were used to give command, such as line up, tidy up and

one by one, please. Binomial expression such as listen and watch them! was also
used to give command. In as much as the teacher encourage student to be active,
teacher implemented play-based learning so they used some utterances to sign a
transition for a new topic or activity, such as okay, now, so, well. Those
utterances made teachers talk to be more interactive. Besides, a bundle we are
going to was also used by teachers.
The using of FE can give positive impact towards students language
development. The teachers indirectly gave model to the students in using the
utterances. For example, when the teacher tried to connect weather, topic at that
time, with windmill for pilot in the airport, the teacher explained and used illustration
made in whiteboard. In verbal commentary that accompanying the picture, the
teacher said take off and turn over. A lot of students did not know what the
meaning of those words. Therefore, the teacher gave verbal commentary and linked
the material to illustration in daily life. During the commentary, it is often that there
are some words have not been understood by students so it is a good input for
students for their future language development.
It is also found that the teacher used collocations, and then the pattern was
followed by the students. For instance, when the teacher used sunny day and
drizzle day then the students imitated that utterance. Other finding is that the
students tend to be more active to ask question if they found some words they did not
understand yet. For example, when the student asked about the meaning of
overcast, then the teacher tried to give clue by saying overcast sky. Other student
could guess the meaning of overcast because it is about sky. Furthermore, the
teacher also used collocation to mention place information, such as in the sky, in
the dessert, etc. Those kind of input is beneficial to students who have not
understood about the using of preposition (in, at, on, etc.).
CONCLUSION
This study analyzed what types of formulaic expressions (FEs) used by teachers in
the classroom and the most frequent types of formulaic expressions used. There are
some important points or findings based on the data analysis in the previous chapter,
and the conclusions can be drawn as follows.
First, the two teachers used all types of FEs in the interaction with students.
They were multi word units (MWUs), collocations, idiomatic phrases, binomial
expressions, inserts, and lexical bundles. MWUs were mostly used by the teachers as
the imperative clauses. For example, when the teachers gave command to students in
the classroom and they used the phrasal verb listen up and prepositional verb

come on. Collocations mostly occurred in the form of adjectives and nouns
collocations such as good idea and enough sunlight. Idiomatic phrases were
mostly used as imperative clauses such as take a look, line up, and tidy up.
The teachers used many kinds of inserts such as Good morning for greeting;
okay as discourse marker; right as a question tag; please as the polite
formulae; and guys to single out the addressee of a message in a question or
statement. Binomial expression such as listen and watch them! was also used to
give command. Lexical bundles were mostly used in the form of wh-question
fragments which mostly began with what such as what do you know about and
what is the.
Second, the teachers showed greater productivity on three types of FEs;
lexical bundles (203), inserts (196), and collocations (166) and produced less MWUs
(30), idiomatic phrases (7), and binomial expressions (14). The less production of
MWUs and idiomatic phrases is caused by the fact that the teachers tended to use the
expressions which showed the actual meaning to communicate with the students to
avoid misunderstanding. In addition, lexical bundles became the most frequent type
of FEs used by the teachers. It is caused by the fact that the teachers mostly asked
questions to students containing wh-question fragments and yes-no question
fragments. Moreover, the teachers mostly used imperative and declarative clauses
containing more verb phrase fragments and complementizer (if, to, that) or whquestion word introducing dependent clause. Inserts were frequently produced as a
proof that they characteristically occur in spoken language (Biber et al., 1999:56) and
the teachers used them spontaneously so that the communication became more
interactive. The various kinds of expressions used by the teachers also caused the
greater productivity of collocations.
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