Formulaic Language in Native and Second Language Speakers: Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and TESOL

Natural language makes considerable use of recurrent formulaic patterns of words. This article triangulates the construct of formula from corpus linguistic, psycholinguistic, and educational perspectives. It describes the corpus linguistic extraction of pedagogically useful formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing. It determines English as a second language (ESL) and English for academic purposes (EAP) instructors' evaluations of their pedagogical importance. It summarizes three experiments which show that different aspects of formulaicity affect the accuracy and fluency of processing of these formulas in native speakers and in advanced L2 learners of English. The language processing tasks were…