Lexico-grammatical Association Patterns of Little vs. Small and Big vs. Large in EFL Students’ Writing: A corpus-based study

Due to their pervasiveness in a language, the importance of multi-word expressions such as collocations and idioms for second language (L2) learners has been well-documented in the second language acquisition literature (e.g., Wray, 2000, 2002), and at the same time, due to their arbitrary combinations and sometimes undetectable meanings, they have been recognized as a formidable task for L2 learners to master (Nesselhauf, 2003; Walker, 2011). When it comes down to the collocations of synonyms or near synonyms, the task becomes more troublesome for L2 learners because of different collocates and structures of synonymous words (Lee & Liu, 2009; Martin, 1984). The present study aims to examine the use of synonymous adjectives, little vs. small and big vs. large, by Korean EFL students, investigating their lexical associations with the noun, as well as grammatical structures in terms of the attributive and predicative. A corpus (86,121 running words) of Korean EFL students’ written texts from English writing contests was complied. In analyzing the data, the approach to selected lexical items in the present study was influenced by both the lexical (Nesselhauf, 2003, 2005) and frequency-based statistical (Sinclair, 1991) approaches. It was found that Korean EFL students’ use of lexico-grammatical association patterns of little vs. small and big vs. large were not aligned with, even partially opposed to those of the previous studies implemented with native English speakers. The implications of the findings for English language teaching and learning are also discussed.