Open AccessA Learner Corpus of High-Stakes Placement Test Essays of Chinese Second Language Students Through a Corpus Analysis
Author(s) -
Eunjeong Park
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
education and linguistics research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2377-1356
DOI - 10.5296/elr.v4i2.13563
Subject(s) - cohesion (chemistry) , linguistics , test (biology) , computer science , corpus linguistics , academic writing , psychology , natural language processing , mathematics education , paleontology , philosophy , chemistry , organic chemistry , biology
Learner corpora—repositories of authentic texts produced by foreign/second language learners (Granger, 2009)—have widely been used in second language (L2) research due to authenticity and practical insight. This study involves a learner corpus of placement test essays to examine L2 students’ use of lexical bundles and explore their linguistic needs so that the learner corpus can be used as potential linguistic resources for L2 students with their perceived needs. 367 placement test essays from Chinese L2 students in a midwestern university were analyzed in the study. The results show the most frequent use of prepositional phrasal lexical bundles, less frequent use of discourse-organizing bundles, and frequent use of ‘I’ in stance bundles. This study revealed L2 students need to be aware of the use of discourse-organizing bundles for cohesion/logic in academic writing and implied the value of L2 students’ lexico-grammatical use as a resource and investment with pedagogical significance.