Lexical and grammatical collocations in beginning and intermediate L2 argumentative essays: A bigram study

Detong Xia*, Yudi Chen, Hye K. Pae

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Collocations play an important role in L2 learners' fluent and idiomatic language production. Previous studies using a frequency-based approach to studying collocations underscored the potential to use association measures for distinguishing L2 writing proficiency. However, studies in this line have largely neglected the syntactic relation of words within a collocation. In addition, most L2 collocation studies have focused on learners at upper-intermediate levels and above, leaving the use of collocations by beginner-level learners understudied. Using the Yonsei English Language Corpus, this study investigated frequency (measured by normalized frequency and normalized deviance of proportions), formulaicity (measured by mutual information and t-scores), and diversity (measured by normalized entropy scores) of seven lexical collocations and four grammatical collocations in argumentative essays from beginning to upper-intermediate levels. Results showed that upper-intermediate L2 learners used more collocations with higher association strength and diversity than did beginning-level learners. In addition, collocations used by upper-intermediate learners were more idiomatic and suitable for L2 academic writing. The findings indicated that specific collocational patterns (i.e. adverb-verb and verb-preposition) could serve as reliable indicators of distinguishing beginning L2 writing from upper-intermediate L2 writing.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1421-1453
Number of pages33
JournalIRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
Volume61
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2023
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • CEFR
  • L2 writing
  • collocational patterns
  • frequency-based approach

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