Fictional narrative texts such as short stories, novels, fables, legends and myths share certain grammatical, lexical and stylistic features that make them unique. For this reason, it is of prime importance that students of English as a foreign language deal with this specificity in the classroom especially by exploring how ideas are developed and how meaning is conveyed through the use of specific vocabulary in these text types.
New perspectives on vocabulary learning and teaching have led linguists, such as Sinclair (1991), Lewis (1993, 1997 & 2000), Hoey (2005), Meunier & Granger (2008) and Schmitt (2010), among others, to redefine the Lexicon by claiming that this inventory is not only made up of morphemes and words but also formulaic sequences. Precisely, a single instance of this recurrent language phenomenon is defined as, “a sequence continuous or discontinuous, of words” [...] “which is, or appears to be prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar" (Wray 2002: 9).
In this exploratory study, we set out to investigate the recurrence of FSs in unabridged versions of myths and legends from different parts of the world in English. We report on a number of steps that were followed in order to build a small corpus of FSs which are inherent in these narrative text types. A subsequent selection of those strings of words which are both frequently used and pedagogically relevant for ESL primary school students from this corpus will lead to the design of teaching material for this group of young learners.

New perspectives on vocabulary learning and teaching have shifted away from the conception of vocabulary as merely single words to adopt a more comprehensive approach that includes formulaic sequences. These expressions, defined by Wray (2002) as a string “continuous or discontinuous of words […] that is stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use” (p. 7), amount to approximately 52 % of written discourse, according to Erman and Warren (2000). This “pervasiveness” becomes evident in fictional narrative texts such as myths and legends, which additionally share unique grammatical, lexical and stylistic features. The wealthy lexical content that pervades these text types certainly deserves special treatment in the EFL classroom. Both myths and legends offer an array of formulaic expressions that can be explicitly taught not only to enrich learners’ vocabulary, but also to boost their receptive and productive skills. To start with, the audience will be given a brief introduction to what a formulaic sequence is and the benefits that EFL learners can derive from becoming aware of them and using them effectively. Subsequently, they will read an abridged version of a legend for a group of children. After that, they will be presented with a set of pre-reading tasks, which they will have to order considering their linguistic and task complexity. Once their didactic sequences have been discussed, they will be briefly introduced to Nation (2001)’s three processes for learning a lexical item: noticing, retrieval and generative use. Afterwards, they will solve and analyse a series of while-reading tasks aimed at helping EFL learners to both notice a set of selected formulaic sequences and re-use them through more or less guided practice. During their group discussion, they will fill in a checklist through which they will reflect upon the type of task, the context for each task and the possibility for EFL learners to predict the meaning of these chunks, among some other relevant features. Finally, different post-reading tasks will prompt the participants to discuss the possibility for learners to employ the selected formulaic sequences in a new context. We invite participants to genuinely embrace our proposal, discovering in them texts which abound in sequences worth teaching due to the considerable advantages they offer EFL learners.