3.4        Data Collection    5
3.5        Data Analysis    6
4    Results and Discussion    8
4.1    Frequency Differences    8
4.2    Length Differences    8
4.3   Type Differences    10
Conclusion    13
References    15
Table 4.1 Total Frequency    ..8
Table 4.2 Frequency of Formulaic Sequences of Different Length    ..8
Table 4.3 Frequency of Formulaic Sequences of Different Types    10
Figure 4.1 Frequency of Formulaic Sequences of Different Length    ..9
Figure 4.2 Frequency of Formulaic Sequences of Different Types    10
1 Introduction
1.1    Research Background
With the development of economy and deepening reform, English has played an increasingly important role in communication among companies or inter-nations. As the result of characteristic of entirety, formulaic sequence can induce the burden of processing information, help identify spontaneously and pick up, and make for improving the speed of understanding and fluency of expressing. Formulaic sequence learning has become one of the hottest issues and aroused researchers’ great attention in the field of second language learning.
The researches on formulaic sequence are widespread throughout every field of second language acquiring, mainly focus on three aspects: the acquiring of knowledge on formulaic language (Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004; Kathy & Schmitt, 2008; Diao, 2004), the characteristic of using formulaic sequence in writing (Altenberg & Granger, 2001; Cortes, 2004; Fan, 2009; Xu, 2010; Ma, 2009; Wang & Zhang, 2006), and use in oral English (Qi, 2008; Wang & Huang, 2011). On the whole, the study on formulaic sequence in second language learning has taken shape and developed well.
1.2 Significance of the Study
English has become more and more universal. While during English acquiring, English writing was regarded as the most part among five basic skills. Because some research showed that application of formulaic sequences could make better writing, this paper tries to analyze the differences of formulaic sequence used in argumentative writing among students of different English writing levels.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Definition and Classification of Formulaic Sequence
For this paper, the definition and classification are the key to process this study. But from research on formulaic sequence, we can find that people have different understandings in definition of terms and core-concepts (Xu & Xu, 2007). The definition, identification and classification of formulaic sequence are also still in disagreement (Duan, 2008).
2.1.1 Definition of Formulaic Sequence
Formulaic sequence theory is linguistic theory, which studies on formulaic sequence in meanings, types, features, teaching advantages and so on. From this, what formulaic sequence is language structure which is relatively high occurrence, relatively fixed form, structure, and meaning. It is applied in fixed language context. It is made up with two or above words, and it is memorized, extracted and processed as an entity (Chen, 2007).
Formulaic sequence is a string of pre-term words coherent or incoherent or other units of meaning. It is stored in the memory as a whole, without the use of grammar to generate and analyses, can be directly extracted as a whole (Wray, 2002). And I choose the later one.
2.1.2 Classification of Formulaic Sequence
Formulaic sequence usually can be pided into four types: complex words, poly words; word partnerships; institutionalized utterances; sentences frame and heads (Lewis, 1997).
According to Nattinger (1992) pided it into four types from the perspective of types and functions: poly word; institutionalized expression; phrasal constraint and sentence builder. 不同英语写作水平学生议论文写作语块使用差异研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_29508.html