The noticing of formulaic sequences by Turkish learners of English

This study was carried out with the objectives of assessing the vocabularyknowledge and the noticing of formulaic sequences by upper intermediate ELT majoringsophomore (fourth semester-second year) students of the Faculty of Education in theUniversity of Çukurova. The study was carried out as a partial replicate of the Ph. D.Dissertation of Bishop (2004). A total of 46 participants were selected with a standard test.All the students were subjected to Vocabulary Knowledge Scale as the pre-test to assesstheir knowledge of target lexical items. The participants were randomly divided into twogroups (treatment and control). The study was carried out using a specially designed onlinecomputer program. The treatment group (Test 2) was given a text containing 10 salient(underlined and bold) formulaic sequences and 10 non-salient single words. The controlgroup (Test 1) was given the same text with the same single target words and formulaicsequences in non-salient form. Glossary help was sought by clicking on the target singlewords and target formulaic sequences. The program also incorporated the post-test with 20T/F questions for assessing comprehension. The program instantly stored participants?individual data. The VKS results indicated that the participants knew more target singlewords than target formulaic sequences. The target formulaic sequences and the singlewords were sought for the same intensity of glossary help. The salient formulaicsequences received more request for glossary help than the non-salient formulaicsequences but the difference was not statistically significant. The results of post testindicated that the mean number of correct answers were very similar in both groupsimplying that salience did not significantly increased comprehension.Key Words: noticing, formulaic sequences, noticing hypothesis, vocabulary acquisition