The role of the reference corpus in studies of EFL learners’ use of statistical collocations
(2017) ICAME38 — Location: Pragues, Czech Republic (24.May.2017)
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- In learner corpus research (LCR), there has been a recent boom in the number of studies that have investigated English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ use of statistical collocations (e.g. Bestgen & Granger, 2014; Granger & Bestgen, 2014; Paquot & Naets, 2015; Paquot, forthcoming a & b). These studies have adopted an approach first put forward by Schmitt and colleagues (e.g. Durrant & Schmitt, 2009) to assess whether and to what extent the word combinations used by learners are ‘native-like’ by assigning to each pair of words in a learner text an association score (typically a pointwise mutual information and/or a t-score) computed on the basis of a large reference corpus. The reference corpus differs across studies. Thus, Granger & Bestgen (2014) made use of the British National Corpus (BNC) to evaluate EFL learners’ use of bigrams in the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al, 2009); Paquot (forthcoming a & b) extracted statistical collocations from the L2 Research Corpus (L2RC), i.e. a large specialized corpus of research articles in applied linguistics, to assess learners’ use of adjective + noun and verb + object combinations in term papers in linguistics written by French EFL learners sampled from the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes Database (VESPA); and Paquot & Naets (2015) used the web corpus ENCOW14 (http://corporafromtheweb.org/encow14/) to analyze statistical collocations in the Longitudinal Database of Learner English (LONGDALE, Meunier, 2015). The main objective of this study is to investigate the role of the reference corpus in LCR studies of statistical collocations in learner writing. It is driven by the following research questions: - To what extent are results replicable if another reference corpus is used to calculate association scores? - Depending on the learner corpus data investigated, should we use a general reference corpus or a specialized corpus to compute association measures? To answer our research questions, we replicate the method used in Paquot & Naets (2015) and Paquot (forthcoming a & b): we extract relational co-occurrences (i.e. adjective + noun, adverb + adjective, adverb + verb and verb + direct object relations) from dependency parsed versions of the BNC, ENCOW14 and L2RC and compute their mutual information (MI) scores with the Ngram Statistics Package (NSP). We then use MI scores computed on the basis of the three reference corpora to analyze the same relational co-occurrences in learner texts rated at different CEFR levels (i.e. B2, C1, C2) sampled from ICLE and VESPA. We compute mean MI scores for each dependency relation in each learner text (cf. Bestgen & Granger, 2014) and compare their distribution across proficiency levels. Distributions in the CEFR-based learner data sets are tested for normality and accordingly compared with ANOVAs followed by Tuckey contrasts or Kruskal-Wallis rank sum tests followed by pairwise comparisons using Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Preliminary results confirm previous research by demonstrating that the more advanced learners use more native-like collocations irrespective of the reference corpus. However, MI scores computed on the basis of the three different reference corpora seem to reveal different aspects of phraseological proficiency in learner writing, most notably the use of general vs. genre-specific collocations. References Bestgen, Y. & Granger, S. (2014). Quantifying the development of phraseological competence in L2 English writing: An automated approach. Journal of Second Language Writing, 26, 28–41. Durrant, P., & Schmitt, N. (2009). To what extent do native and non-native writers make use of collocations? IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 47(2), 157–177. doi:10.1515/iral.2009.007 Granger, S. & Bestgen, Y. (2014). The use of collocations by intermediate vs. advanced non-native writers: A bigram-based study. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 52(3): 229-252. Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F. & Paquot, M. (2009). The International Corpus of Learner English. Version 2. Handbook & CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2009. Meunier, F. (2015) Introduction to the LONGDALE project. In E. Castello, K. Ackerley, & F. Coccetta (Eds.) Studies in Learner Corpus Linguistics: Research and Applications for Foreign Language Teaching and Assessment. Bern: Peter Lang. Paquot, M. (forthcoming a). Phraseological competence: a missing component in university entrance language tests? Insights from a study of EFL learners’ use of statistical collocations. Language Assessment Quarterly. Paquot, M. (forthcoming b). The phraseological dimension in interlanguage complexity research. Second Language Research. Paquot, M., Hasselgård, H. & S. Oksefjell Ebeling (2013). Writer/reader visibility in learner writing across genres: A comparison of the French and Norwegian components of the ICLE and VESPA learner corpora. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (Eds) Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research: Looking back, Moving ahead. Corpora and Language in Use – Proceedings 1, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Paquot, M. & Naets, H. (2015). Adopting a relational model of co-occurrences to trace phraseological development. Paper presented at the 3rd Learner Corpus Research Conference, 11-13 September 2015, The Netherlands.
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Paquot, M., & Naets, H. (2017). The role of the reference corpus in studies of EFL learners’ use of statistical collocations. ICAME38, Pragues, Czech Republic. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/127775