Investigating the validity of internet television as a resource for acquiring L2 formulaic sequences

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the validity of the suggestion that internet television can facilitate EFL learners' acquisition of formulaic sequences (FSs). A quantitative study was conducted to examine the extent to which FS use on internet television reflects FS use in the everyday speech of English-speaking communities. The study compares the distribution of FSs in a 7.68 million-word corpus of internet television (the iTV corpus) with that in the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). The results confirm the validity of using internet television as a resource for the acquisition of FSs that are highly frequent in everyday speech. The fact that the frequency at which FSs appear on internet television is directly proportional to that in everyday speech suggests that internet television might help EFL learners establish an accurate intuition about the frequency of use of FSs, which is shown to be missing by previous corpus studies. The article also provides suggestions about the choice of internet television programmes based on the extent to which the distribution of FSs in each iTV subcorpus is similar to that of the spoken component of the BNC.