Part 1: Course Details

Course Summary:  This course will feature vocabulary fromup-to-date authentic language that is commonly used by English native speakers.The vocabulary encompasses part of the most frequent 3,000 words, common idioms,and lots of formulaic language. The selection of these will be corpus-based toenhance the usefulness. The learning strategies include roots and affixes, moreproductive approach (speaking) for practice vocabulary.

Thetarget group is Chinese public junior high school students in year9 in a Chinese first-tier and most developed city, Shanghai.

This course serves as a supplement to these students’ Englisheducation in school which requires them to master at least 1,600 words and morethan 300 phrasal verbs, at the end of the year 9. The general vocabulary size willbe around 2,000 word families. This course will add around 600 words andhundreds of pieces of formulaic language including phrasal verbs to that size,enabling my students to engage in authentic daily English. After the course, mystudents will be able to manage to watch original American and British TV shows,speak English naturally and quite fluently, and make good conversations withEnglish natives living in Shanghai.

Part 2: Literature Review

The literature I will consult will berelated to word parts, formulaic language, vocabulary teaching methodology,speaking training especially for fluency, and using TV shows or movies to aidteaching.

Following are general literature and studiesI can draw upon regarding overall design or relevant concepts.

Nation, Paul (2006) details the coverage ofspoken text with different vocabulary sizes. It provides data underlying one ofthe aims of this course.

Hulstijn, J.H. and Laufer, B. (2001) putsforward Involvement Load Hypothesis, which breaks down the engagement intothree aspects, need, search, and evaluation. This can be used to guide thevocabulary learning activities I will design.

Following are relevant literature andstudies relating to word parts, specifically roots and affixes.

Yurtbasi, M., (2015) introduces theimportance of roots and affixes, and listed 27 roots and 55 affixes that aremost useful to unlock more words.

Rasinski, T. V. et. al. (2011) recognize theimportance of English roots and affixes when learning vocabulary, and proposesseveral game-like activities to aid the learning in class.

Following are relevant literature andstudies relating to formulaic language.

Vilkaitė, L. (2016) investigats thedistribution of formulaic language, and unveils the importance of it.

Folse, K. (2012) attests to the prominentvalue of retrievals in terms of vocabulary retention, and this offers part ofthe principles that underpin the exercises I will design.

The book written by Siyanova-Chanturia, A. andPellicer-Sanchez, Ana (2019) gives a rather comprehensive introduction andexplanation of formulaic language, the pedagogical implications (chapter 8) andemploying Corpus in teaching formulaic language (chapter 10) are quite useful.

The article by Wood, D. (2010) explains thecognitive process of storing and retrieving formulaic language, providesdetails of both quantitative and qualitative studies as well as concluding theimplications of the findings.

Cooper, T. C. (1998) introduces idioms andthe effective ways to teach them with activities that are appealing tostudents.

The article by Grant, L. E. (2007) probesinto the nature of spoken idioms based on British National Corpus. With theanalysis of frequency, this article also gives pedagogical justifications onwhether the idioms in questions are worthwhile.

These findings can inform the speakingactivities and fluency enhancement I provide with my students in class.

Nation, Paul (2007) provides generalconditions for the four strands, input, output, language and fluency, and theimplications and principles for integrating the four strands in teachingvocabulary to students.

Saito, Kazuya, and Hanzawa, Keiko. (2018) isknown for studies of oral output in L2, and their article recognizes thesignificance of input for developing second language speaking skills.

Nation, Paul. (1989) examines theimprovement of speaking during repetitive unrehearsed speaking, providinginsights into enhancing speaking fluency.

Namaziandost, Ehsan, Hashemifardnia, Arash& Shafiee, Sajad, (2019) compare four groups of subjects doing exercises(opinion-gap, reasoning gap, information gap and a control group) and prove thatthe information gap group achieves the best result in speaking fluency.

The study by Namaziandost, Ehsan, Homayouni,Mina & Rahmani, Pegah, (2020) confirms that two cooperative activities employedin the experiment have a better effect on speaking fluency.

These findings can inform the choice of choosingTV shows and movies to expand my students’ vocabulary.

Pujadas, G., & Muñoz, C. (2019) comparedifferent modes of watching TV for learning English vocabulary, and the resultsupports the captioned TV as the best setting for vocabulary acquisition.

Webb, S. (2010) demonstrates that eventhough few words reoccur more than 10 times, watching movies regularly (meaningmore movies) can have noticeable effects on vocabulary acquisition

Part 3: Benefits of ThisDissertation

From my personal experience as a student andteacher, the current teaching methodology is ineffective, due to the negligenceof a communicative focus. Overall, the learning has become a memorisationprocess, and lack of integration causes deficiency in using English despite ratherlarge vocabulary size and decent grammar.

This course design could be a torch pointingout the direction of future reforms. The primary benefit is to teach studentsto communicate in English and be aware that the fundamental function of alanguage is to convey meaning. Thus, this course has a more productive focus,integrating vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation into an organic whole forcommunication. 

The distinctive features of this course arethe word parts and fluency building. The former is an effective strategy formemorizing vocabulary. The latter, rarely seen in public schools, is key tobuilding up my students’ integration proficiency of English.

My future career goal is to be a Junior highschool English teacher in a private training institution, teaching students asa supplementary course. Due to the ineffectiveness of public schools inteaching English, this course is profound as it opens the door to genuinelyengage with English as well as strengths my students’ knowledge acquired inschool.

With more and more chances of exposure toEnglish, as the accessible Internet offers huge amounts of original English TVshows, movies, videos, audios and increasingly more native English speakerslive in Shanghai, the target students will find it much easier to enjoy a moreand more international context.

Reference List:

Cooper, T. C. (1998). ‘Teaching Idioms’Foreign

Language Annals, 31(2): 255–266.doi:10.1111/j.1944-9720.1998.tb00572.x 

Folse, K. (2012) ‘Applying L2 Lexical Research Findingsin ESL Teaching’,TESOL Quarterly, 45(2): 362- 369.

Grant, L. E. (2007). ‘In a manner of speaking: Assessingfrequent spoken figurative idioms to assist ESL/EFL teachers’,System,35(2): 169–181.

Hulstijn, J.H. and Laufer, B. (2001) ‘Some empiricalevidence for the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition’,Language

Learning, 51(3):539-558.

Nation, Paul (2006) ‘How large a vocabulary is neededfor reading and listening?’,Canadian modern Language Review, 63(1): 59-82.

Nation, Paul (2007) . ‘The Four Strands’,Innovation

in Language Learning and Teaching,1.1 (2007): 2-13.

Nation, Paul. (1989) ‘Improving Speaking Fluency’System (Linköping), 17.3: 377-84.

Namaziandost, Ehsan, Hashemifardnia, Arash &Shafiee, Sajad, (2019) ‘The impact of opinion-gap, reasoning-gap, and information-gaptasks on EFL learners' speaking fluency’,Cogent Social Sciences, 5(1)

Namaziandost, Ehsan, Homayouni, Mina & Rahmani,Pegah, (2020) ‘The impact of cooperative learning approach on the developmentof EFL learners' speaking fluency’,Cogent arts & humanities, 7(1)

Pujadas, G., & Muñoz, C. (2019). ‘Extensive

viewing of captioned and subtitled TV series: a study of L2 vocabulary learning

by adolescents’, The

Language Learning Journal, 1–18.

Rasinski, T. V. et. al. (2011). ‘The Latin-GreekConnection’,The Reading Teacher, 65(2): 133–141. doi:10.1002/trtr.01015.

Saito, Kazuya, and Hanzawa, Keiko. (2018) ‘The Role ofInput in Second Language Oral Ability Development in Foreign Language Classrooms:A Longitudinal Study’, Language Teaching Research : LTR22.4: 398-417.

Siyanova-Chanturia, A. & Pellicer-Sanchez, Ana (2019)Understanding formulaic language : a second language acquisition perspective,London: Routledge.

Vilkaitė, L. (2016) ‘Formulaic language is not all thesame: comparing the frequency of idiomatic phrases, collocations, lexicalbundles, and phrasal verbs’,Taikomoji kalbotyra, (8): 28-54

Webb, S. (2010). ‘A corpus driven study of the potentialfor vocabulary learning through watching movies’,International Journal of

Corpus Linguistics, 15(4): 497–519.

Wood, D. (2010)Formulaic language and second

language speech fluency: background, evidence and classroom applications,London: Continuum.

Yurtbasi, M. (2015) ‘Building English vocabulary throughroots, prefixes and suffixes’,Global Journal of Foreign Language Teaching,5(1)