A data-driven contrastive study on Malay ESL learners’ use of lexical verbs and verb-noun collocations in argumentative writing / Shazila Abdullah

Learner writing is often characterized by linguistic errors, especially in lexical verbs, which can contribute to communicative incompetence. It is also generally known that verb-noun collocations are a characteristic of native writing. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic errors made by non-native learners and to suggest ways how they can improve their level of proficiency. Previous studies have looked into the occurrences of either lexical verbs or verb-noun collocations with little emphasis on the phraseology of verb-noun collocations formed from commonly used lexical verbs. Based on these premises, the thesis explores the use of lexical verbs and verb-noun collocations in two learner corpora, one of which is a native learner corpus and the other a specific group of non-native learners, i.e. Malay ESL learners. The data-driven analysis specifically adopted for this study allows for a focus on the most commonly used lexical verbs and verb-noun collocations. Furthermore, an in-depth contrastive interlingual analysis between the corpora of native and non-native learners enables the researcher to uncover the difficulties that learners face in using these lexical items