The Impact of Teaching Formulaic Sequences on Improving the Writing Skills of Freshman Students at an American University in the Middle East

Abstract

According to the rules of the Ministry of Higher Education in the United Arab Emirates, all students who desire to learn in any university must pass one of the standardized language tests to start their undergraduate studies. In the teaching context where the study took place, the majority of students struggle to score a 6.5 in the writing part of the IELTS exam, or 5 in the TOEFL test. The students’ main weakness lies in their inability to develop their writing further; they struggle to expand on a sub-topic in the writing exam. The students’ never-ending struggle to improve in writing; is because they tend to memorize the word without trying to study its different aspects, for example, what part of speech the word is or its collections. Accordingly, the study proposed the integration of the formulaic sequences to help them learn the different aspects of a word.