Profile

Fazal’s research interests align nicely with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and socio-cultural aspects of language acquisition with a focus on Hindi/Urdu, TESOL and EFL. Second language teachers and students’ issues and challenges; discourse analysis; 1st and 2nd language course development and syllabus designing.

His current research involved an examination of how the explicit teaching of formulaic sequences in the second language classroom may increase the speed of learning and the fluency of second language usage. Formulaic sequences include both idiomatic strings like ‘by and large’ and more literal formations like ‘very sorry to keep you waiting’ or ‘I’m sorry to hear about X’. They are extremely common in the natural discourse of all languages; it is estimated that 50 to 70% of conversational speech is made up of these prefabricated chunks.

Prefabs are used to accomplish recurring communicative needs and studies have shown that they are processed more quickly and easily that other kinds of sequences. The research examined a large corpus of Urdu discourse to identify formulaic sequences and see how they can be used in teaching English to Urdu speakers and Urdu to English speakers. This research was the first documentation and analysis of formulaic sequences in Urdu.