Japanese EFL Learners Colligation/Collocation Patterns Multiple Comparison

Japanese EFL learners’ colligation/collocation patterns Multiple comparison Yukio Tono (Lancaster, UK)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate Japanese EFL learners’ colligation and collocation patterns. What is unique in this study is not only to compare colligation/collocation patterns of L2 learners between L2 learner corpora and native speaker corpora, but also between L2 learner corpora and L2 learners’ mother tongue corpora (in my case, Japanese). This study aims to reveal some overuse and underuse patterns of colligations and collocations and to identify possible causes of those uses to either developmental patterns in L2 itself or to L1 mother tongue influence.

Corpora The L2 corpus used for this study is taken from the JEFLL (Japanese EFL Learner) Corpus, which is composed of three sets of corpora: (a) Japanese EFL learners’ written and spoken data (written data c. 400,000 words; spoken data c. 50,000 words), (b) English textbook corpus (c. 150,000 words) and (c) Japanese corpus (c. 100,000 words). There are some strengths in my learner corpus project. First, learner corpora in JEFLL are developmental in nature and can be used for interlanguage development studies. Second, the learner data can be compared with their primary input source, i.e. English textbook corpora. Since in Japan English is taught primarily in the classroom, the role of English textbooks cannot be underestimated. There is a good chance that learner English is affected by the patterns shown in the textbooks, but very little research has been done so far to identify the influence of textbooks on learner performance. JEFLL Corpus can be a good resource for such research. Thirdly, L1 interference is always a key issue in interlanguage development studies, but it has been extremely difficult to identify exactly the cause-effect relationship between L2 performance and L1 mother tongue influence. The Japanese corpus in JEFLL consists of general Japanese writing as well as the same written essay topics used for eliciting English data. Thus it is possible to examine the patterns in Japanese expressions, which might affect the patterns in L2. For NS corpus, the ICE-GB will be used for colligation patterns and the BNC will be used for collocation patterns.

Hypotheses The following hypotheses will be tested: 1. There are fixed patterns of collocations and colligations in learner language, which are distinct from the NS patterns. 2. Some of the patterns in (1) derives from developmental process of L2. 3. The patterns other than (2) possibly derives from L1 mother tongue patterns.

Collocation/colligation patterns This study focuses on the following collocation/colligation patterns: a. ADJ+NOUN collocations b. basic verb colligation (e.g. make, take, have, give, get, etc.)

Data analysis After the basic lemmatization process, collocation patterns will be extracted by using n-gram extraction programs written by Perl. Colligation patterns will be extracted in the following steps. First, all the data are processed by the Apple-Pie Parser (developed by Tutomu Sekine at NYU). Second, the learner data is manually corrected. Third, major verbs are retrieved for concordance lines. Fourth, different colligation patterns are semi-automatically extracted by using Perl. Japanese corpus data is processed by Japanese morphological analyser called Chasen (developed by Yuji Matumoto at Nara Institute of Technology). The frequency data will undergo statistical procedure called loglinear analysis in order to see the effect of L1, L2 and NS corpora on collocation/colligation patterns of L2 learners. The results have not been out yet, but this study will surely shed more light on the nature of interlanguage development and propose a new approach toward the study of learner language.

Bibliography De Cock, S., Granger, S., Leech, G. and McEnery, T. (1998) An automated approach to the phrasicon of EFL learners. In Granger, S. (ed.) Learner English on Computer. Addison Wesley Longman, London and New York, pp. 67-79. Granger, S. (1998) Prefabricated patterns in advanced EFL writing: collocations and formulae. In Cowie, A. (ed.) Phraseology: theory, analysis and applications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 145-160.