Lexical collocations in Arabic-English bilinguals' writing across two proficiency levels

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

Bilingual Writers and Corpus Analysis

Publication Date

12-23-2022

Abstract

This chapter describes an investigation into the use of adjective+noun, verb+noun and noun+noun lexical collocations in a sample of texts from the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC) (Palfreyman & Habash, 2021): one English and one Arabic text each by 20 undergraduate writers, rated at the B1 and B2 levels of the Common European Framework of References for languages (CEFR). It focuses on two of the most widely measured dimensions of collocational competence – frequency and exclusivity – using statistical data from two large online reference corpora. The chapter first discusses previous research findings in students’ collocational use as identified in other learner corpora, before describing the research methods and procedures used to identify and extract the collocations. It then goes on to present the main findings and makes comparisons both between languages and between the two different CEFR levels within each language. It also presents lists of the top 10 most frequent and most exclusive collocations from the texts that appear across all student writing within both the Arabic and English ZAEBUC sub corpora.

ISBN

9781000782660,9781003183921

Publisher

Routledge

First Page

157

Last Page

200

Disciplines

Education | Linguistics

Scopus ID

85143713962

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

Link to Full Text

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