A Study on Formulaic Expressions in L2 Development

This study examines one child’s second language (L2) writing development in social learning contexts over a six-month period from the age of seven years and five months.It describes L2 development during the first months of the child’s schooling and interprets it in terms of a socio-semantic approach to language learning. The study, which adopts a qualitative approach in an interpretivist/constructionist research paradigm, entailed the collection and interpretation of data through multiple sources: observation, interviews, and written texts.The analytical framework for the overall interpretation is provided by systemic functional linguistics. A metafunctional analysis of the child’s written texts shows that, widening social and cultural experience and developing theL2, the child has expanded the meanings she could make with the language in the culture. The analysis also shows that a distinguishing feature of the child’s writing is the use of formulaic expressions. The study argues that from a sociosemantic perspective formulaic expressions are meaningful and worthy of analysis in language and mental development, since they were an important resource for the child’s L2 developmentand mental processes of repeating and memorizing the same forms are thought-stimulating. Therefore, it suggests that language teachers need to teach functionally relevant expressions for situations to early L2 learners.