Corpus-based interlanguage analysis of multi-word combinations in terms of overuse and underuse as evidenced in native and non-native corpora

Abstract

Argumentative essay writing is one of the areas in which language learners should be competent enough to be able to make their arguments and defences be visible by the readers. In this context, essays of students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are analysed since they may seem to present problems of writing which make their written productions seem rather inadequate in some respects when compared to the essays of native speakers in terms of collocational content, which is the main rationale for this study. Therefore, the purpose of this research study is to examine the verb+noun collocations with seven base verbs in order to reveal similarities and differences, the overuse and the underuse patterns applied by the native and two non-native corpora. With this objective in mind, the researcher compiled her own corpus named TUCLE which stands for Trabzon University Corpus of Learner English with 21 preparatory students during the time she was teaching reading and writing skills. The second non-native corpus is KTUCLE which stands for Karadeniz Technical University Corpus of Learner English. Lexical comparisons of TUCLE and KTUCLE were carried out to display the collocational competencies of non-native tertiary level EFL students; thus, the research required a reference corpus for comparison. As a result, LOCNESS, which stands for Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays, was used. All three corpora comprise of argumentative essays, which made it possible to make contrastive interlanguage analysis among them. The data for the study was quantitative in nature; the research was carried out with the help of AntFile Converter and Sketch Engine which are freely available online corpus tools. The contrastive interlanguage analysis of the corpora revealed that non-natives are not as competent as natives in terms of their collocational usages. Based on the analysis, it was observed that native students employed various types of combinations quite unlike their non-native counterparts who seemingly employed limited amount and number of these collocations with limited variety and scope. Additionally, non-native learners as evidenced in the two corpora (TUCLE and KTUCLE) seemed to show various overuse and underuse patterns in terms of the use of collocations, which may be due to the several factors such as inadequate competency and proficiency in vocabulary and collocations.