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.