The effects of explicit teaching of formulaic language on academic writing

The present study investigated the effects of the explicit teaching of formulaic language on the overall quality of academic writing, specifically argumentative writing of university students. Participants are 44 freshman and 27 sophomore students at the ELT Department of Yeditepe University which were grouped as the experimental and the control. Before the intervention, a pre-test was conducted to determine the use of formulaic language and the overall quality of the essays. Then, the experimental group was explicitly instructed on 40 target formulaic language items, an organisational template constructed for argumentative writing and three thesis statement structures for two weeks. After the intervention a post-test, a final test and a delayed post-test were given to all students in order to see whether the explicit instruction had any effect on the use of formulaic language that was taught and the overall quality of writing. The descriptive statistics indicated that the experimental group increased the overall quality scores of their writing after the intervention and this increase was found to be statistically significant through Wilcoxon signed rank test. Although a decrease was observed in the delayed post-test of the experimental group students, the mean scores of them in the overall quality of the essays were higher than those of the control group in each test, which was also found to be statistically significant by the inferential statistics. On the other hand, the overall quality scores of the control group obtained from the essays did not change immediately but increased later in the final test; however, the Friedman test revealed that this increase was not statistically significant. Mann-Whitney U test results also indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental and the control groups regarding both the type and the tokens of target formulaic language items used. After the intervention, experimental group students used greater number and more variety of formulaic language items in each test than their counterparts in the control group. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between the frequency of the formulaic language items used and the overall quality scores of the essays. The explicit teaching of organisational template constructed for argumentative writing had some positive effects on the organisation of the essays as well since the percentage of the students following the recommended templates gradually increased for the experimental group while it decreased for the control group. On the other hand, the results indicated that the students of both groups did not use some of the elements of the recommended template in their essays and mostly missed elements were mainly related to stating the opposing views. Lastly, the thesis statement writing was also affected by explicit teaching, as the percentage of the students at the pre-test who wrote a thesis statement not in compliance with any recommended structures gradually decreased at each test after intervention. In light of these findings, it could be stated that the explicit instruction of the target formulaic language items raised the awareness of the students about the use of formulaic language and improved the overall quality of the argumentative writing, but it did not lead to any consistent improvement on students' later production in the long term. However with the help of pedagogical approaches mentioned in this study explicit teaching might be helpful for the students to learn formulaic language and improve their writing and it should be the focus of further research considering the possible limitations. Key words: Formulaic language, explicit teaching, academic writing,argumentative writing