THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT IN TEACHING FORMULAIC SEQUENCES TO ESL/EFL STUDENTS

Jamal Abdesalam Alarbai

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT IN TEACHING FORMULAIC SEQUENCES TO ESL/EFL STUDENTS Abstract by Jamal Abdesalam Alarbai, Ph.D. Washington State University December 2016 Chair: Thomas Salsbury This study investigates the effects of three interventions in the teaching of formulaic sequences: Explicit, Engagement and Highlighted and how these treatments will affect the learning and use of formulaic sequences by ESL/EFL students. This research examined the effects of each treatment on students’ receptive and productive knowledge in learning and producing such sequences measured by multiple-choice and Cloze tests. Because the study included engagement activities, an engagement survey was used to ascertain how engaged the participants were with the learning and use of the target formulaic sequences. The current study also uses a teacher’s log where the participating teacher had to answer a survey and made comments on the participants’ engagement during the class sessions. The study found that the students in the highlighted treatment performed at a significantly higher level than the other three conditions in their production knowledge of formulaic sequences. However, there were no significant differences between the groups in their receptive knowledge. The results of the study suggest that the highlighted procedure facilitated learning of the target formulaic sequences when the learning is measured by a test. Most importantly, the study found that all the other groups improved after the interventions which helped increase awareness of the frequencies and functions of the formulaic sequences in expert writers’ texts. The findings from both tests, the survey and the teacher’s log indicated that students’ abilities to learn and produce the target formulaic sequences may depend on the way the activities are designed. The current study highlighted the importance of considering culturally appropriate pedagogy which was unintentionally neglected in this study. This oversight impacted the results of the statistical tests, but it provided evidence for the value of implementing tasks during and outside of the regular class period that align with students’ cultural expectations. This was particularly the case for teacher-student interactions and group membership. The study results suggest that all the approaches used in this study may be helpful for the students’ learning of formulaic sequences for the purposes of writing and should be the focus of future experimental research.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT IN TEACHING FORMULAIC SEQUENCES TO ESL/EFL STUDENTS

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