Formulaic language in French EFL learner writing: cross-linguistic influence, discourse functions and L1 frequency effects
(2014) Forskningsserien om AndraSpråk — Location: Stockholm, Suède (28.March.2014)
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- (en) Keywords: learner corpora, phraseology, lexical bundles, cross-linguistic influence, form-meaning mappings, frequency effects The last few years have witnessed a remarkable boom in the number of studies that examine learners’ use of lexical bundles, i.e. “recurrent expressions, regardless of their idiomaticity, and regardless of their structural status” (Biber et al. 1999: 990). Some of the studies have attributed specific patterns of misuse, overuse and underuse of lexical bundles to the learners’ mother tongue (see Paquot & Granger, 2012 for a review). However, until very recently, no study had targeted transfer effects on EFL learners’ production of recurrent word sequences as their primary object of investigation. In this talk, I report on three recent studies I conducted to fill in this existing gap. The first two studies made use of Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework to test transfer effects on lexical bundles of various sizes in the French component of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger et al, 2009) as compared to nine other ICLE learner sub-corpora (Paquot, 2013; Paquot, submitted). Transfer effects were best detectable in French EFL learners’ selection of a number of English word combinations whose translational equivalents are deeply entrenched in their mental lexicon (more particularly discourse organizers and stance markers). In the third study, I also made use of corpora of different first languages (French and Spanish) to show that L1 frequency effects play a crucial role in learners’ use of recurrent word sequences in input-poor environments.
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Paquot, M. (2014). Formulaic language in French EFL learner writing: cross-linguistic influence, discourse functions and L1 frequency effects. Forskningsserien om AndraSpråk, Stockholm, Suède. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/198807