International Journal of Learner Corpus Research - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2022

Abstract

Lexical bundles are frequently recurring word sequences (e.g. as can be seen) that function as building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study examined the use of four-word lexical bundles in business emails written by three groups of writers: intermediate business English learners, advanced business English learners, and working professionals. The prominent structural and functional characteristics of lexical bundles expressed in business emails were identified and compared across the three groups. The results showed that lexical bundles were related to the extent to which formality and politeness were expressed in written business communications. The advanced business English learners and working professionals used more structural and functional characteristics of lexical bundles that are characteristic of written conventions than did intermediate business English learners. Both intermediate and advanced learner groups used functionally different lexical bundles from those produced by the working professionals.

Abstract

English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks typically present a prescriptive typology of three or four conditional types. We examine the extent to which this long-established English Language Teaching (ELT) typology is reflected in four varieties of English by comparing the forms and functions of four samples of 620 if-conditionals from French school EFL textbooks (TEC-Fr), French L1 Learner English (OpenCLC-Fr), Web English (EnTenTen15-S) and British English (BNC-S). The ELT typology accounts for considerably less than half of if-sentences in the reference data. Even in the EFL textbooks, only 57% of if-conditionals match the typology explicitly taught in their grammar sections. For many formal and functional features, the learner data sits halfway between the distributions of the textbook and reference data. We conclude that the ELT typology needs to be adapted to provide a more representative account of if-conditionals that focuses on L1 and L2 usage and meaning over form.

Abstract

In this study, we apply Gries and Deshors’s (2014) and Deshors and Gries’s (2016) MuPDAR(F) approach to explore the use of synonymous adjectives tärkeä (i.e. “important”) and keskeinen (i.e. “central”) in academic native and advanced learner Finnish, linking the phenomenon with the general assumptions of usage-based cognitive linguistics. This method confidently modelled the differences between using near-synonyms in native data and distinguished between native-like and non-native-like uses in learner data. Crucially, it differentiated between the contexts in which one synonym was clearly favoured and those in which either one was acceptable, in accordance with Gries and Deshors (2020). The results suggest that Finnish learners fairly coherently follow the tendencies of native speakers, but several variables differentiate their use of synonyms from the latter’s. We interpret the differences to reflect complexity- and prototypicality-related phenomena. On the one hand, learners use more common options more often. On the other, non-nativelike adjectives are used only in contexts that are structurally in the most prototypical and least complex form, suggesting that learners employ complexity-related structural alternations – e.g., non-prototypical grammatical subjects or degree modifiers – after lexical alternations.

Abstract

This article presents the longitudinal trilingual corpus of young learners of Italian, German and English called LEONIDE. The corpus consists of L1, L2 and L3 learner texts. L1 texts were written in two languages of schooling (i.e. Italian and German), L2 texts in two languages learned as second languages (i.e. German and Italian), and L3 texts in an additional foreign language (i.e. English). All texts were collected from a group of lower secondary school pupils from the multilingual Italian province of South Tyrol whose development in all three languages was observed over a period of three years. Each text comes with rich metadata as well as manual and automatic annotations.

Abstract

This report introduces the University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus (PELIC; Juffs et al., 2020), a publicly available 4.2-million-word learner corpus of written texts. Collected over seven years in the University of Pittsburgh’s Intensive English Program, these texts were produced by more than 1,100 students with diverse linguistic backgrounds and proficiency levels. Unlike most learner corpora which are cross-sectional, PELIC is longitudinal, offering greater opportunities for tracking development in a natural classroom setting. This potential is illustrated in an overview of the research conducted to date with these data. The report also provides a description of PELIC’s creation and contents, including how the texts have been managed to facilitate natural language processing. Overall, the corpus contributes to the field of learner corpus research by adding to the pool of freely and publicly available learner corpora, supplemented by a useful set of Python tools and tutorials for accessing these data.

This article reviews Defining and Assessing Lexical Proficiency9780429321993

This article reviews A Corpus Study of Collocation in Chinese Learner English978-1-138-20556-7

This article reviews Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition9781108442299