Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
Formulaic language is at the heart of corpus linguistic research, and learner corpus research (LCR) is no exception. As multiword units of all kinds (e.g., collocations, phrasal verbs, speech formulae) are notoriously difficult for learners, and corpus linguistic techniques are an extremely powerful way of exploring them, they were an obvious area for investigation by researchers from the very early days of LCR. In the first part of this article, the focus is on the types of learner corpus data investigated and the most popular method used to analyze them. The second section describes the types of word sequences analyzed in learner corpora and the methodologies used to extract them. In the rest of the article, we summarize some of the main findings of LCR studies of the learner phrasicon, distinguishing between co-occurrence and recurrence. Particular emphasis is also placed on the relationship between learners’ use of formulaic sequences and transfer from the learner's first language. The article concludes with some proposals for future research in the field.
Crossley, S. A., & Salsbury, T. (2011). The development of lexical bundle accuracy and production in English second language speakers. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Teaching, 49, 1–26.
Crossley and Salsbury traced the development of two-word lexical bundles in the speech of six EFL learners over a period of one year. They compared their frequency of use with that found in the Santa Barbara Corpus (a collection of casual conversation recordings), and reported that overall the learners begin to produce bigrams at a more nativelike frequency as a function of time studying English and English proficiency. At the same time, they observed that some bundles (e.g., I am, I have, I did, I want, maybe I, and you can) remained more frequent, most probably because they carry a greater pragmatic load in learner speech.
Gilquin, G. (2007). To err is not all. What corpus and elicitation can reveal about the use of collocations by learners. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 55, 273–291.
This article made use of both learner corpus data and experimental data to study advanced French-speaking EFL learners’ knowledge of make-collocations. The corpus study showed that learners did not make many errors when using make-collocations, but they tended to underuse them and preferred those collocations that had a direct equivalent in French. In the elicited data, on the other hand, the error rate was much higher and learners’ judgments were often unreliable.
Nesselhauf, N. (2009). Co-selection phenomena across new Englishes: Parallels (and differences) to foreign learner varieties. English World-Wide, 30, 1–26.
In this article, co-occurrence phenomena that only display a low degree of idiomaticity and culture-boundedness (e.g., competing collocations such as play a role and play a part, the noun complementation of collocations such as HAVE + INTENTION + of –ing vs. to + infinitive, and nonnative prepositional verbs such as demand for) are shown to occur across both institutionalized (Kenyan, Indian, Singaporean, and Jamaican English) and learner varieties of English. Except for new prepositional verbs that are more frequent in L2 varieties, the frequency of these co-occurrence phenomena in institutionalized varieties lies between that in native speaker English and in learner English.
Waibel, B. (2008). Phrasal verbs: German and Italian learners of English compared. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM.
This book is an in-depth study of the use of phrasal verbs by German and Italian EFL learners. While the two learner populations share a number of features of unnaturalness in their use of phrasal verbs (collocational deviations, choice of a wrong phrasal verb, and simplification of meaning), they also differ substantially. For example, German learners made extensive use of highly colloquial and informal phrasal verbs. Due to the semantic similarity of German particle verbs and English phrasal verbs, they also used more phrasal verbs. The study not only investigated the influence of the first language on learners’ use of phrasal verbs, it also considered the impact of other learner and task variables (e.g., exposure, use of reference tools).