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 Vygotsky’s 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, Vygotsky’s

Interactionist Theory, formulaic expressions, teacher talk.

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 child’s 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 Vygotsky’s 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 children’s 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 children’s 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 Sa’diyah (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-Murcia’s (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? I’m fine, thanks. How are you?); collocations (verb object: spend money, adverb-

adjective: 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: Multi-

word 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

don’t have to, it’s 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

don’t 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 conversation’s

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’

production1. Multi word units (MWUs)

Phrasal and prepositional verbs (PP)Complex prepositions (CP)Correlative coordinators (CC)Complex subordinators (CS)Multi-word verb constructions

2. CollocationsAdjectives – NounsNouns – VerbsNoun – NounVerbs – PrepositionVerbs – AdverbsVerbs – AdjectivesAdverbs – AdjectivesAdverbs – AdverbsCollocations in prepositional phrases

30260004

166412736154612225

3. Idiomatic phrases 74. Binomial expressions

Noun and/or nounAdjective and/or adjectiveVerb and/or verb

5. InsertsGreetings and farewellDiscourse markerResponse elicitors

14752

1962853

Response formPolite formulaeVocatives

64375

6. Lexical Bundles (LB)Lexical bundles that incorporate verb phrase fragments (LB- type 1)Lexical bundles that incorporate dependent clause fragments (LB- type 2)Lexical bundles that incorporate noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments (LB-type 3)

205146

52

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 ‘that’s 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 “let’s read first.”, “take a look at” to direct pupil’s

attention to the whiteboard or the textbook. “I want you to” and “You don’t 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 teacher’s 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 wh-

question 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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