Formulaic Language and its Role in Persian Language Teaching

This descriptive study investigates formulaic language in Persian. There are two types of formulae: prefabricated (situation-bound) formulae (PFF); and semi-prefabricated formulae (SPFF); they have fixed elements as well as open slots to be occupied with words of given lexical categories. The data is taken from linguistic corpora, soap operas, personal observations, and web materials. This study addresses these questions: a. What contexts are formulae used in? b. What socio-cultural meanings do formulae convey? c. How can learning formulae help overcome the problem of fluency of Persian language learners? Formulaic sequences are used in all socio- cultural contexts and mostly in idiomatic meaning. To analyze the data, the author used his own intuition as well as other native speakers’ along with consulting various dictionaries. In the following ‘dual process model’ is employed to demonstrate the interaction of PFF and SPFF as well as novel language. The implications in teaching involve that introducing the situation and meaning of PFF to learners helps them produce idiomatic native like expressions in a given situation and analyzing the SPFF and identifying their underlying formula, meaning, and restrictions (deductively) and presenting different examples (inductively)to learners they can generate infinite number of native like expressions in Persian.