Prefabricated Patterns in Advanced EFL Writing: Collocations and Formulae

Abstract Since the mid-I98os, the use of prefabricated language (‘prefabs’) has become a major focus of interest in EFL, arguably for three main reasons. First, the emergence of the concept of lexico-grammar, inspired by Halliday and Sinclair, has promoted the syntagmatic investigation of lexis. The traditional association between syntagmatics and grammar, on the one hand, and paradigmatics and lexis, on the other, which was challenged by Michael Halliday as early as 1966, is now clearly a thing of the past. Secondly, corpus linguistics has played an important role, giving linguists the computational means to uncover and analyse lexical patterns. Abundant information about word-combinations can now be obtained with ease using text-retrieval software. Finally, pragmatics has become a major field of study in its own right, in linguistics, and now in EFL. Pragmatic competence has come to be viewed as an essential part of learners’ competence. The formulaic nature of many pragmalinguistic rules has necessarily contributed to bringing the study of prefabs to the fore.