Phraseological complexity in EFL learners’ spoken production across proficiency levels
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Magali Paquot
Abstract
This study explores phraseological complexity in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ spoken production across proficiency levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. Phraseological diversity and sophistication are operationalized as root type-token ratios and median mutual information scores of verb + object co-occurrences respectively. Results draw a complex picture of phraseological complexity in EFL learners’ oral performance, with phraseological diversity increasing on the whole and phraseological sophistication decreasing significantly from B1 to B2. These findings can at least partly be explained by the fact that, unlike EFL learners at B1, EFL learners at B2 and above repeat fewer combinations and use more specific vocabulary, which sometimes leads to less idiomatic combinations that should nevertheless be considered as traces of qualitative development.
Abstract
This study explores phraseological complexity in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ spoken production across proficiency levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. Phraseological diversity and sophistication are operationalized as root type-token ratios and median mutual information scores of verb + object co-occurrences respectively. Results draw a complex picture of phraseological complexity in EFL learners’ oral performance, with phraseological diversity increasing on the whole and phraseological sophistication decreasing significantly from B1 to B2. These findings can at least partly be explained by the fact that, unlike EFL learners at B1, EFL learners at B2 and above repeat fewer combinations and use more specific vocabulary, which sometimes leads to less idiomatic combinations that should nevertheless be considered as traces of qualitative development.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Complexity, accuracy and fluency in learner corpus research 1
- Investigating the scopes of textual metrics for learner level discrimination and learner analytics 21
- Syntactic complexity measures as linguistic correlates of proficiency level in learner Russian 51
- Development of L2 writing complexity 81
- Phraseological complexity in EFL learners’ spoken production across proficiency levels 115
- Persistent errors in spoken English among Taiwanese and Czech learners at CEFR B2 and C1 137
- Measuring lexical accuracy 159
- The effect of time and dimensions of collocational relationship on phraseological accuracy 181
- Interaction between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity at different proficiency levels 209
- Accuracy, syntactic complexity and task type at play in examination writing 241
- Contextualizing fluency in advanced spoken learner language 273
- Exploring the use of repeats in learners’ native and interlanguage production 299
- Index 325
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Complexity, accuracy and fluency in learner corpus research 1
- Investigating the scopes of textual metrics for learner level discrimination and learner analytics 21
- Syntactic complexity measures as linguistic correlates of proficiency level in learner Russian 51
- Development of L2 writing complexity 81
- Phraseological complexity in EFL learners’ spoken production across proficiency levels 115
- Persistent errors in spoken English among Taiwanese and Czech learners at CEFR B2 and C1 137
- Measuring lexical accuracy 159
- The effect of time and dimensions of collocational relationship on phraseological accuracy 181
- Interaction between grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity at different proficiency levels 209
- Accuracy, syntactic complexity and task type at play in examination writing 241
- Contextualizing fluency in advanced spoken learner language 273
- Exploring the use of repeats in learners’ native and interlanguage production 299
- Index 325
