The EFL formula: strategies for teaching and learning English as a foreign language in primary schools

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This research examines the role of formulaic language in teaching and learning EFL in primary schools. The study will be threefold. The first step will be to categorise formulaic subtypes, in terms of their relevance to EFL, based on both distributional properties (using corpus techniques) and the widely-reported processing and fluency effects (validated using psycholinguistic techniques such as eye-tracking). Secondly, the findings will be applied to the development of EFL materials to be used in primary schools. Finally, effectiveness of the materials in a classroom intervention in Hong Kong will be evaluated through a mixed methods approach. Despite the importance of English as an official language in Hong Kong, recent evidence suggests that competency levels are low and it is proposed that spoken and written English should receive more emphasis in Hong Kong schools (Bacon-Shone et al., 2015). The prominence of English as a second language in Hong Kong makes it an excellent case study for this project. Hong Kong primary school children aged 10-11 have been identified as the most suitable participants to have developed the cognitive and linguistic skills necessary to understand a range of materials.