L2 collocation profiles and their relationship with vocabulary proficiency: A learner corpus approach

Abstract

The current study extends extant research on lexical collocation and L2 English proficiency by analyzing how L2 argumentative writings assessed at different proficiency levels differ in their compositions of weakly and strongly associated collocations. Using a Natural Language Processing pipeline, a total of 640 essays from the ICNALE corpus (Ishikawa, 2018) were analyzed for word pairs that are syntactically related (e.g., Verb-Direct object), and the relationships between the relative proportions of collocations with varying strengths of association (SOA) and vocabulary proficiency scores were examined. A series of regression analyses revealed that collocations from various MI score bins showed distinct patterns of use across proficiency levels, indicating, for example, increases in the use of strongly associated collocations and decreases in the use of repelled collocations. The finding also indicated that band-based MI measures demonstrated better predictive validity than mean MI scores in modeling the vocabulary proficiency score.