Tracking L2 writers’ phraseological development using collgrams: Evidence from a longitudinal EFL corpus
(2018) Corpora and Lexis — ISBN: [9789004361126], p. 277-301, published
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- In the last decade, learner corpus research has been characterised by a wide range of studies focused on phraseological aspects of learner language. However, very few have tracked the phraseological development of the same learners over an extended period of time. In this chapter, we discuss the results of an investigation of the learner phrasicon based on the Longitudinal Database of Learner English, a collection of written data produced by EFL learners over a period of three years. For our study, we made use of a subcorpus consisting of 178 texts written by 89 French-speaking learners. Each learner contributed an argumentative essay in their first year (T1) at university and another in their third year (T3) on the same topic. To assess learners’ phraseological development, we developed a methodology relying on collgrams, i.e. word bigrams that have been assigned two association scores (mutual information (MI) and t-score) on the basis of a large reference corpus. Analysis revealed a general tendency for T3 texts to contain fewer non-collocational bigrams (past people) and fewer high-scoring t-score collgrams (in particular), but more high-scoring MI collgrams (paramount importance). These results are very similar to those obtained when the same method is applied to cross-sectional data. In the conclusion, we point to some applications of the method for teaching, testing and automated scoring of learner texts.
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Bestgen, Y. (2018). Tracking L2 writers’ phraseological development using collgrams: Evidence from a longitudinal EFL corpus. In Hoffmann, S., Sand, A., Arndt-Lappe, S., Dillmann, L.M. (ed.), Corpora and Lexis (Brill, p. p. 277-301). Brill. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/221365