Introduction

Almost certainly there are more non-native speakers teaching English worldwide than there are native-speaker teachers of English as a foreign language. Among the many problems such teachers face is that of teaching part of the phrasal inventory of English. I am going to suggest that most of these problems are insuperable, and so a measure of realism is required as to what a non-native speaker teacher of English as a foreign language can accomplish. Fortunately, some of the problems associated with students of English learning phrasal lexical items are the same regardless of whether the teacher is a native speaker or not, and we can learn from those problems. (Nattinger & de Carrico (1992) give an extensive account of how a formulaic view of speech production may be utilized in second language teaching.)

 The most basic level at which foreign languages are learned is a good place to start. In many airports in Europe where tourists leave for their summer vacations, you can purchase small dictionaries of basic phrases. Almost all these phrases are formulae of one form or another. They tell you how to ask for things, how to thank people, what phrases to use to tell the time and so forth. Let us suppose you learned all these phrases studiously before you went to Crete for your vacation. You would surely then not be a speaker of Greek, but you would probably be able to get about reasonably well. People who were native speakers of Greek would know what you were saying at a basic level and your basic needs as a tourist would be fulfilled. Let us suppose, by contrast, that you are a perfect teacher of a language in the sense that when you had finished teaching your students they spoke without an accent, made no grammatical errors, and they produced sentences that made perfect sense. However, one also wants one’s students to become communicatively competent (Hymes, 1968), and what constitutes communicative competence in one community is not the same as that of another (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). Communicative competence is as much social competence as linguistic competence. 

Formulae and communicative competence

Various definitions of formulae exist, but all these definitions share the following common features: 

1. Formulae consist of several words (e.g. How are you?).
2. Formulae are used to fulfil certain pragmatic functions in predictable situations. 
3. Speakers produce or recall formulae as a whole chunk rather than generate them from individual items or with the help of linguistic rules (see e.g. Nattinger & de Carrico, 1992). 

Research on formulae and their place in speech has shown them to be important linguistic units. Each formula or family of formulae has a social niche. Some are familiar to almost all the speakers of a speech community such as casually greeting someone. Others are restricted to small groups such as surgeons working in an operating theatre.

So how do formulae and their associated discourse grammars fit in the ecology of the native speaker’s social and mental order? Formulae are stored as one unit in the brains of speakers. As they are automatic sequences, their production does not require conscious attention, and their usage  leaves  speakers time to plan other parts of their message. In other words, the appropriate use of formulae allow speakers to speak fluently and in a native-like way, i.e. appropriately in socially routine contexts (Pawley & Syder, 1983). Formulae facilitate not only speech production, but they also play an important role both in first and second language acquisition by helping learners acquire rules of syntax (for a review see Weinert, 1995). 

The phrases that constitute a formula are sometimes invariable and at other times relatively flexible. For example, you can apologise by saying ‘‘I’m sorry’, ‘I’m so sorry’, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry’, ‘I’m terribly sorry’. But that is about it. Just what is permissible for each formula is something a non-native speaker must learn in order to gain some measure of communicative competence. In some cases, there seems to be a canonical form, a central form from which the other forms are derived. In the case of the apologies, we would probably want to say that all these are variants of ‘I’m sorry’. But there are other formulae such as ‘shut your trap/mouth’ where it may be that neither ‘mouth’ nor ‘trap’ is canonical, both being about equally possible. Very few studies exist of the variation of formulae along with studies of their context. (But see Aijmer, 1996.)

Formulae often belong in specialised discourses, and to ‘scripts’ within such discourses. The discourse to do with making appointments has a number of possible scripts such as a telephone script where one rings the receptionist of a professional in order to make an appointment. Then there are subscripts dealing with the purpose of the appointment, its possible duration, negotiating a mutually agreeable time and so on. Native speakers know how such scripts run but non-natives may not. So teaching a formula not only involves teaching the formula as a linguistic unit but also teaching its use. It is difficult for an L2 speaker-teacher to acquire the whole discourse structure of such a script without long term access to the speech community of the target language.

Possible malfunctions

Given that there are a great many formulae, non-native speakers can be stuck for formulae in a given situation. They will know that there might be a formula for this context, but they don’t know it. They will therefore either say little or nothing, or make up a novel utterance which they hope will do what they want. For example, in asking for an appointment a speaker might say ‘Give me an appointment, please’, which is a perfectly well-formed English sentence but not a native-like formulaic way of asking for an appointment. Speakers will sometimes use the wrong form of the formula either because they have not learned the actual form of words accurately or because they believe the form to be syntactically or lexically more flexible than it actually is. For example, a non-native speaker might say ‘How are you being?’ instead of ‘How are you doing?’ The former is well on the way to being the normal greeting formula. In fact it makes slightly more sense than ‘How are you doing?’, but it is not part of the formulaic inventory or a normally available variant form of ‘How are you doing?’

Non-native speakers may loan translate a formula from their own language into English thereby hoping that such a loan translation will achieve the same social ends as it does in their own linguistic community. Someone from Taiwan might greet a New Zealand acquaintance by saying ‘Have you eaten yet?’ which functions as a casual encounter greeting in the way that saying ‘Gidday’ might in New Zealand. But for a New Zealander this is not a greeting but could be interpreted as an indirect invitation to a meal. Such cases of loan translation create potential cross-cultural pragmatic failure. It is not that the English is not understood. It is that the cultural presuppositions which lie behind the expression are not understood. 

The same kinds of problems are present on the receptive side of communicative competence. A young migrant male is sitting with a New Zealand host family and has tried out a joke. (Perilous territory.) The joke goes down well; so well that the daughter sitting next to him says, ‘You’re pulling my leg.’ In shocked affront the young man says ‘I didn’t touch your leg’. Not knowing that this is an idiom he has translated it as if it were a literal phrase.

In some areas formulae turn over quite quickly. For example teenage slang often has quite a short life. A non-native teacher may know an appropriate formula for a particular social setting but it may be archaic in a native speaker environment. Given the size of the formulaic inventory in a target language, students may be so pleased to have acquired some of it that they overuse the formulae they have learned. In teaching English, therefore, one is not just teaching a language but also a culture, and formulae are a significant linguistic part of a culture. 

Teaching implications

The first lesson to be drawn about formulae is that no teacher is able to teach a non-native speaker of English all the formulae of English since there is not enough class time to teach all but a small subset. The good news is that even native speakers know only a small subset of a language’s formulae. 

The major lesson to be drawn from the way native speakers learn the formulae they do know is that virtually all of it is learned passively from living in a culture. The more exposure both non-native teachers and L2 learners have to native ‘texts’ and their contexts the better. So what would be useful for teachers in Hungary? Clearly, long term living in an English speaking environment is optimal. England is closer than it was and Hungary’s potential entry into the EC would create opportunities through programmes like the Erasmus programme for such language learning opportunities.

At second best are techniques like watching English language films and videos. Selecting carefully is important. For everyday vernacular formulae, TV soap operas provide excellent modelling for students. They are highly formulaic and tend to portray everyday scenes. In England they tend to be set in working class dialect areas which may be a disadvantage since Hungarian students of English may not wish to acquire working class Manchester idioms. American sitcoms and soap operas tend to be in a middle class general American dialect which is less socially located. The advantage which such multimedia texts have is that they portray both the formulae of the language and the contexts in which they are used. Role playing can be used to build on the discourse varieties which have been passively acquired in this way and make them into more active vocabulary. 

It follows that teachers themselves need to know just what the target scripts or scenes are like. This is by no means always clear even to native-speaker teachers. If you ask an English native speaker why, for example, he or she uses a particular way to make an appointment with a doctor, the chances are they could not tell you. It is just the way that it is done by English speakers. Nor is this way known explicitly. Speakers could not even tell you what they had done. Such teaching therefore has a research dimension for the non-native speaker teacher in attempting to come to an understanding of the underlying native speaker intuitions about the areas of formula use the teacher is trying to teach. It is clear that the more time non-native teachers of English can spend in contact with English medium ‘texts’ or even more positively in English-speaking cultures the better they will know the formulaic inventory of English and thus the better they will be able to teach it.
 

References

Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversational routines in English. London: Longman.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
Hymes, D. (1968). The ethnography of speaking. In J. Fishman (Ed.), The Sociology of Language (pp. 99-138). The Hague: Mouton.
Nattinger, J.R., & de Carrico, J.S. (1992). Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pawley, A., & Syder, F. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. Richards & R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and communication (pp. 191-226). London: Longman.
Weinert, R. (1995). The role of formulaic language in second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 16, 180-205.