Advanced Learners’ Use of Lexical Collocations in Academic

adverb-adjective, adjective-noun, and verb-noun collocations in argumentative essays, and results of these studies have demonstrated that learners’ use of these collocations is deviant from native speakers’ in terms of the numbers as well as types of employed collocations and error-free use. One thing should be noted is that the discrepancy between ESL/EFL learners’ and native speakers’ collocation use is not limited to the genre of argumentation. There are, in fact, some studies illustrating a similar divergence between learners’ and native speakers’ collocation use in academic writing.

Adopting a phraseological approach, Howarth (1998) conducted a comparative study on native speakers’ and non-native speakers’ use of restricted verb-noun

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collocations (e.g. ‘draw a comparison’ and ‘perform a task’) in academic writing.

Comparing collocations identified in a 25,000-word learner corpus of non-native postgraduate essays with the norms established in a 240,000-word corpus of British academic writers, Howarth reported that postgraduates produced fewer (around 50%) restricted verb-noun collocations than natives did. In addition to quantitative discrepancy, a qualitative difference was also revealed by the fact that around six percent of learners’ collocation use was unconventional (e.g. *perform a project, *pay effort/care, *reach findings, *draw a correlation, etc.) Based on these findings, Howarth concluded that the lower density of restricted collocations and instances of awkward collocational expression might suggest learners’ limited knowledge of verb-noun collocations as well as low awareness of appropriate verb-verb-noun collocation employment.

While Howarth’s (1998) study yielded learners’ difficulty in using verb-noun collocations in academic English, Durrant & Schmitt’s (2009) and Li & Schmitt’s (2010) studies revealed that adjective-noun collocations were also problematic for advanced non-native learners. Using MI-values and t-scores for analysis, Durrant and Schmitt (2009) undertook a comparative study on the use of adjective-noun and noun-noun collocations in native and non-native speakers’ academic writing. In their study, Durrant and Schmitt collected texts at different lengths (i.e. long and short) produced by native speakers and ESL/EFL learners. The native corpus, containing approximately 94,000 words, was composed of long texts from Prospect and academic journals as well as short texts from opinion articles in newspapers and LOCESS. The 87,000-word non-native corpus contained long texts from a British EAP project and a Turkish EAP project as well as short texts from a British short essay pool and the Bulgarian subcorpus of ICLE. The researchers first extracted all adjective-noun and noun-noun combinations

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from the two corpora, and excluded combinations containing unwarranted components (i.e. proper nouns, acronyms, pronouns, possessives, semi-determiners, and numbers/ordinals) or occurring less than five times in the BNC. Collocations passing the two filtering stages were then measured with MI-value and t-score, and those failing to reach the cutoff points (i.e. MI-value at least 3 and t-score at lease 2) were excluded from further comparison and discussion.

Comparing adjective-noun and noun-noun collocations identified in the native corpus with those in the native corpus, Durrant and Schmitt discovered that non-native speakers’ use of low frequency collocations (i.e. appearing less than five times in BNC) was distinguishably different from native speakers’ in long texts. The native speakers’ rate of using low frequency collocations was 48%, whereas the rate for non-native speakers dropped to 38%. In addition to low frequency collocations, discrepancy between natives and non-natives were also revealed in both the t-score analysis and the MI-value analysis. For t-score analysis, non-native speakers were reported to employ collocations with very high t-scores (t-scores > 10) significantly more often than native speakers. However, a reverse condition was found in the MI-value analysis. Non-native speakers were reported to rely on strong collocations to a lesser extent than natives did, and to underuse collocations with MI-values bigger than seven. The results of Durrant and Schmitt’s research suggest that, compared to the native norm, non-native speakers tend to overuse high-frequency items but underuse high-MI ones.

A similar pattern of learners’ overuse/underuse behaviors was also reported in Li and Schmitt (2010). Adopting the same types of frequency-based association measures, Li and Schmitt investigated four Chinese postgraduates’ development of collocation use over a period of one academic year (i.e. three terms). They collected eight essays and one dissertation from each participant to build a learner corpus. To examine these

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learners’ collocation use over time, the researchers first extracted all adjective-noun combinations from the 150,000-word learner corpus. Extracted combinations were then removed from analysis if they contained components such as hyphenated adjectives, pronouns, possessives, etc. The remaining collocations were then further divided into frequent and infrequent combinations, and infrequent collocations (i.e. appearing less than four times in the BAWC) were excluded from further statistical measures (i.e. MI-value and t-score).

The results of Li and Schmitt’s study identified 494 tokens of adjective-noun collocation employed by the four Chinese postgraduates, which made up of 299 types.

Of these 299 types, 41.1% were considered frequent and strongly-associated collocations (MI-value >3, t-score>2), and 58.9% were considered infrequent combinations. In other words, the learners’ use of robust (i.e. frequent and strongly-associated) types was proportionally similar to that of rarely-occurring types. In terms of tokens, however, the learners showed a tendency to employ robust collocations more often than the infrequent ones, which was demonstrated by the sharp contrast between the low TTR for robust collocations (0.43) and high TTR for infrequent ones (0.90). In addition, the researchers also reported the learners’ tendency to repetitively employ several types of collocations and their modest increase in using collocations with high t-scores during the academic year. Regarding the collocations with high MI-values, however, no increase was found in the learners’ use of these items. In terms of learners’

overuse and underuse behaviors, findings yielded in Li and Schmitt echo with those in Durrant and Schmitt (2009), that is, less proficient non-native writers are inclined to use collocations with high t-scores but relatively low MI-values, whereas proficient/native writers demonstrate reverse preference.

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2.2.3 A Re-examination of Advanced Learners’ Overuse/Underuse Behaviors Based on Large-sized Academic Corpora

Studies reviewed in Section 2.2.1 and Section 2.2.2 all point to the fact that advanced learners’ have great difficulty in appropriately using lexical collocations in their writing. Compared to the native/published writers’ norm, learners are reported to produce fewer collocations, misuse some non-conventional combinations, or overuse high frequency collocations. Regarding the issue of overuse and underuse, learners are found to exhibit the tendency of overusing high t-score collocations but underusing those with high MI-values, whereas native/published writers demonstrate a reverse preference. This phenomenon is consistently observed in the production of academic collocations in learners’ and native/published writers’ writing.

While results of these studies seemingly lead to a general conclusion regarding advanced learners’ collocation use, there are, however, some limitations in these studies.

One of the major limitations is the small size of the corpora investigated in these studies.

As can be seen from the previous two sections, the largest learner corpus investigated in previous research only contained approximately 250,000 words in total, and many other investigated corpora were even sized far below this number. It is afraid that findings generated from these small-sized corpora cannot really represent the features of advanced learners’ use of lexical collocations. In addition to the small corpus size, none of these studies present a list of the frequently overuse/underused collocations.

While readers are informed about the learners’ preference of highly frequent collocations and disfavor of mutually-associated ones, they still do not know ‘which’

collocations are frequently overused/underused by learners. The researcher here thus argue the need to generate a list of commonly overused/underused academic collocations in order to offer valuable information for EAP teaching/learning.

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To better facilitate leaners’ knowledge of academic collocations, the present study aimed to generate two lists of frequent collocations. The first list, as discussed in Section 2.1.3, was a discipline-specific verb-noun and adjective-noun academic collocation list, which can serve as a reference for EAP teachers and learners. Using the first list as the norm, the second list contained verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations overused/underused by Taiwanese EFL learners. It is argued that the compilation of a frequently overused/underused collocation list can better facilitate our understanding of these learners’ use of these lexical collocations. Four research questions were thus raised in the present study for generating the two lists:

Research Questions

1. What are the frequent verb-noun (V-N) and adjective-noun (A-N) collocations in published authors’ writing in the field of applied linguistics?

2. What are the frequent verb-noun (V-N) and adjective-noun (A-N) collocations in Taiwanese EFL learners’ writing in the field of applied linguistics?

3. To what extent do Taiwanese student writers’ use of these frequent V-N and A-N collocations differ from that of the published authors?

4. What are the V-N and A-N collocations overused/underused by Taiwanese student writers in the field of applied linguistics?

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CHAPTER THREE

METHOD

The current study is a corpus-based investigation of published authors’ and Taiwanese EFL learners’ usage pattern of collocations in academic writing. The first section of this chapter introduces the self-compiled reference corpus and learner corpus investigated in the present study. The instruments employed to examine the use of V-/A-N collocations in the two corpora are introduced in the second section. Finally, the procedure for extracting frequent collocations and identifying over-/underused items are explained in the last section.