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Using Syntactic Co-occurrences to Trace Phraseological Complexity Development in Learner Writing: Verb + Object Structures in LONGDALE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

By
Magali Paquot ,
Hubert Naets  and
Stefan Th. Gries
Edited by
Bert Le Bruyn  and
Magali Paquot
Bert Le Bruyn
Affiliation:
UIL-OTS, Utrecht University
Magali Paquot
Affiliation:
FNRS – Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain
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Summary

This study investigates phraseological complexity development in the writing of French learners of English as a Foreign Language from the Longitudinal Database of Learner English (LONGDALE). More particularly, it examines the effects of proficiency and time spent learning English on the phraseological sophistication of verb + object relations, which is measured with mutual information at three data collection points. Results of a mixed-effects model in which we control for potential effects of topic/prompt show that learner proficiency, as assessed by a standardized test, is a better predictor of phraseological complexity in each learner writing sample than the actual data collection point at which the essay was written, thus suggesting that the time dimension does not add anything to, or modify what we already know about, EFL learners’ use of statistical co-occurrences as represented in this longitudinal corpus.

Keywords

phraseologystatistical co-occurrencescollocationsdependency relationslongitudinal learner corpusproficiencyprompt
Type
Chapter
Information
Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition , pp. 122 - 147
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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