Corpus analysis of the support verb construction development and use by EFL learners

Abstract

Students of English as a Foreign Language are facing a variety of problems that make their academic writing fail to meet the required criteria in terms of lexical complexity and variation, which could be related to the ignorance of collocational nature of English language as well as the failure to consider the phraseological nature of the language. Thus, the purpose of this computerized contrastive learner corpus analysis is to analyze the overall frequency and development of support verb constructions as well as investigating the common support verb construction misuses. For this purpose, the academic essays written by university students of English in 1st and 2nd years were taken as the samples for the study. Lexical investigation of KTUCALE corpus, which was solely compiled to serve the objectives of this study, entailed the presence of another similar sized academic corpus and, as a result, British Academic Written English (BAWE) was selected as the reference academic learner corpus for the study. Purposive sampling methodology was used in the study and the analysis was done by comparing the language use of the learners who were categorized into two distinct levels with respect to their present language proficiency levels through Oxford Online Placement Test and the levels of the subjects (n:120) were determined based on the scores they got from the test. The data for the study were both qualitative and quantitative in nature. Quantitative analysis of the learner corpora findings was followed by a qualitative analysis of the learners' responses to the questionnaires, retrospective protocols and student diaries. The main findings of this contrastive learner corpus analysis revealed that KTUCALE learner corpus is much less complex in terms of support verb construction diversity and density than the reference corpus BAWE. Another finding was that the support verb construction samples from KTUCALE were shaped by excessive overuse and underuse of some of the most frequently used words. Yet another finding was a high level of diversity in terms of the incorrect use of support verb constructions as a result of the learners' limited word stock rather than from their ignorance of these multi-word combinations.