First Year University Students’ Use of Formulaic Sequences in Oral and Written Descriptions

Abstract

The present article investigates the use of first year university students’ formulaic sequences in written and oral texts in an English as a foreign language context. The corpus of the study consists of eight descriptive texts—four written and four oral—which were composed of four students of English Pedagogy at a university in Santiago, Chile. The investigation is a case study where the corpora were analysed qualitatively. The results show that first-year students use similar formulaic sequences in written and oral texts and many of the expressions generally used in spoken discourse are used by students in written texts.

Keywords

• Formulaic sequences
• lexical bundles
• oral and written discourse
• pre-fabricated chunks