Degree Adverbial Collocations in the Korean EFL Learners’ Writing Corpus - With a Focus on Intensifiers

Degree Adverbial Collocations in the Korean EFL Learners’ Writing Corpus

  Vocabulary expansion is essential for learners to gain proficiency in L2, but learners’ lexical knowledge has not drawn much research attention in SLA (Howarth, 1996). In an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learners’ competence, this paper investigates the use of a lexical item in the writing corpora. In particular, it compares the frequency and distribution of intensifiers in the EFL corpus with those in a native English corpus. The result of the frequency analysis in the EFL corpus offers an evidence of significant overuse of the limited types of maximizers and boosters, which in turn result in the inflated frequency of intensifiers. Further, the present study uses the mutual information score to measure the strength of the bond between selected intensifiers and adjacent lexical items. The result does not clearly demonstrate associations between the intensifier and the adjacent words due to the small corpus size, but it provides some possible pedagogical implications for L2 teaching. The frequency information rather than the information on the strength of associations between intensifiers and adjacent words, for example, would be more helpful to EFL learners.