AUTHOR=Du Xiangtao , Afzaal Muhammad , Al Fadda Hind 

TITLE=Collocation Use in EFL Learners’ Writing Across Multiple Language Proficiencies: A Corpus-Driven Study

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=13

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.752134

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.752134

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>The investigation of learners’ interlanguage could greatly contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language and the development of teaching materials. The present study investigates the collocational profiles of large-scale written production by English learners with varied L1 backgrounds and different proficiency levels. Using the British National Corpus as reference corpus, learners’ collocation use was extracted by corpus query language and further identified by <italic>t</italic>-score <italic>via</italic> Python programming language. The collocation list consists of 2,501 <italic>make/take</italic> + noun (the direct object) collocations. Findings show that proficient learners tend to use collocations containing more semantically complicated and abstract noun elements for varied communication tasks. Moreover, advanced learners are inclined to use collocations comprised of more difficult and longer noun elements.</p>