Phraseological awareness of tertiary level Turkish efl learners as evidenced in native and non-native corpora

Abstract

The current research focuses on phraseology as a part of the linguistic field so as to draw attention to use of phraseology in academic prose by Turkish EFL learners. Phraseology which can be also called as formulaic language has gained dramatical interest recently as it enables learners to use the language as naturally as it has to be. Susan Hunston (2011: 5) states that "Phraseology is a general term used to describe tendency of words and a group of words, to occur more frequently in some environments than others". Many linguists underline the importance of phraseology for language learning environment and many studies are conducted in the linguistics field of the phraseology. Dating back to the 1950s, phraseology has recently been one of the main interests in the linguistics field although it was neglected many years. Languages are enhanced by word combinations and it can be emphasized that phraseological awareness of learners is crucial for a language user and current research tries to draw attention to tertiary level Turkish EFL students' phraseological performances in academic prose by researching their writings and comparing them with native speakers' writings. Regarding that phraseology is a broad area of linguistic inquiry, in the current study, one of the most crucial branches of the phraseology, lexical bundles, defined as at least three-word recurrent combinations mostly occur in a sentence or context are the main interest. Biber (2006: 174) states that "lexical bundles are crucial for constructing a discourse in university register". Apart from Biber, Barbieri (2007) states that "lexical bundles are important blocks of discourse". Four-word lexical bundles which are categorized by different linguists into different fields are the main concern in the current study. In the methodology part while carrying out the research both two native speakers' corpora, BAWE and LOCNESS and two Turkish corpora KTUCALE and TICLE are analyzed so as to find out the how Turkish EFL learners use bundles. Based on the most common lexical bundles in reference corpora and in a corpus analyzed by Biber (1999), current study aims to see usage of lexical bundles in Turkish EFL learners' academic writings compared to performance of native students' performance over the lexical bundles. By analyzing the frequencies of four word more bundles with their LL scores it enables to see how effective do the Turkish EFL learners use the lexical bundles in academic prose compared to native students' writings and what are the characteristics of Turkish EFL learners' use of lexical bundles. The investigation of lexical bundles showed that Turkish EFL learners commonly overuse and underuse the lexical bundles comparing to native learners and their preferences of lexical bundles are not the same with preferences of native learners.