A frequency-based exploratory study of word combinations by EFL learners towards adjective-noun collocations

The mastery offormulaic sequences by language learners is considered to be crucial since itenables them to accomplish the basic communicative requirements (Wray, 2002) oftarget language use. Of all the formulaic sequences, the mastery ofcollocations is known to have an enormous impact on learners’ ability to movebeyond the intermediate level. This data-driven study explores the wordcombinations (both conventional and unconventional L2 strings) of L2 users ofEnglish. Specifically, the adjective-noun combinations in an L2 corpus (TurkishUndergraduate Writers of English) were explored to find the potential L2strings functioning as unconventional collocations. Then, these L2 strings werecompared with the adjective-noun collocations in the LOCNESS corpus todetermine whether the choices made by L2 learners differed from those of L1users. The findings show that the spectrum of the L2 word combinations wasbroader in comparison with LOCNESS. The results suggest that the L2 learnersproduced a higher number of unconventional collocations than conventionalcollocations matching with the L1. The L2 strings support that the use ofcollocations can be rather problematic for learners of English however advancedthey are. Some pedagogical implications of the findings for explicitcollocation and vocabulary teaching are discussed.