Previous studies have shown that formulaic language is a significant part of language overall. While formulaic language is a vital arsenal to achieve a more nativelike fluency, learners often have difficulties acquiring formulaic language. To this moment, there is no consensus on how to include formulaic language in learning a language. While formulaic language covers a broad range of multiword units, there have been various attempts to compile certain types of formulaic language, such as dictionaries of collocations, idiom dictionaries, lexical bundles in academic language. Martinez and Schmitt (2012) compiled a Phrasal Expressions List, PHRASE List, consisting of 506 most frequent phrasal expressions, each defined as a string of two or more words that may or may not be appearing contiguously, that have a specific meaning or function where the meaning is potentially non-transparent. The individual words forming the phrasal expressions are frequently used words in English, making the phrasal expressions deceptively transparent: English learners might think they know the phrasal expressions' meaning as the component words are familiar to them, but they might have misunderstood them. Integrated into the list of the first five thousand most frequent individual words, the PHRASE list was designed as a guide for learners, teachers, and syllabus designers alike so that formulaic language can be included in the language-learning/teaching process.
The present study aims to compare the occurrences of phrasal expressions in the PHRASE list in the essays written by learners of different proficiency levels and native speakers in the ICNALE Corpus, a collection of controlled essays and speeches in English produced by learners coming from ten Asian L1 backgrounds and native speakers. The phrasal expressions in Martinez and Schmitt’s PHRASE List were extracted from the ICNALE’s written essays using the Antconc software (Anthony 2019. Several steps were taken to arrive at the numbers of occurrences, both type and token wise, of those phrasal expressions in the essays: (1) Phrasal expressions found in the writing prompt are were excluded, (2) All possible forms of phrasal expressions that have multiple forms (due to the expressions containing verb lemmas and/or pronouns) were extracted instead of just the basic form in the list (3) All occurrences of the phrasal expressions in the essays went through meaning-related filtering to make sure only those that were indeed used in the meanings intended in the phrasal expressions list were included and counted.
There were four research questions to be answered. The first question is about how phrasal expression types in Martinez and Schmitt’s PHRASE List that were used in the ICNALE essays written by learners of four proficiency levels and native speakers. The second one is about which phrasal expressions in the list were used by those five groups of writers. The third about the numbers of occurrences of the phrasal expressions in the essays, and the last one about the differences between the five groups of writers in terms of the phrasal expressions use.
The findings showed that 88% of the investigated phrasal expression types from Martinez and Schmitt’s Phrasal Expressions List were used in the written essays. If we look at each group of writers, the percentage of use ranges from 50.5% to 73.6%, suggesting that the writers in ICNALE were familiar with at least 50% of the phrasal expression types in the list. Further investigation also showed that in all five groups of writers, the phrasal expressions within the frequency band of the first thousand most frequent words had the largest number of tokens. The frequencies of occurrences continued to decrease as the frequency band dropped, with the least number of tokens for the phrasal expressions in the fifth thousand frequency band. This finding indicates that the phrasal expressions in Martinez and Schmitt’s list behave in a similar way as most frequent individual words. In addition, comparisons between each writer group are in line with earlier studies that less proficient language learners used less formulaic language. In contrast, more proficient learners used more formulaic language, although they still cannot match the English native speakers. Although Martinez and Schmitt’s Phrasal Expressions List is just a small subset of formulaic language, the list can be used to guide which multiword expression can be included in language teaching. The present study suggests that Martinez and Schmitt’s Phrasal Expressions List might help learners become more proficient language users.
The following line of research can be considered for future research: (1) the differences between English native speakers, English as a second language (ESL) learners, and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in using phrasal expressions; (2) Analyzing learners’ incorrect use of phrasal expressions; (3) A longitudinal study on how language learners develop mastery of formulaic language over time. |