To what extent do native and non-native writers make use of collocations?

By Philip Durrant, N. Schmitt. 2009

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09dfabe39cdc80353d18fa9ae9f9e000f78bda9a

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Citations in the corpus

Formulaic Language in Learner Corpora (2012, methodology): “Durrant and Schmitt (2009), for example, made use of the British National Corpus to calculate the t score and MI score for each adjacent premodifier-noun combination extracted from two learner corpora and two comparable corpora of native student writing (see later in this article for a summary of…”
Not just ‘small potatoes’: Knowledge of the idiomatic meanings of collocations (2017, background): “Similarly, Durrant and Schmitt (2009) looked at the production by L2 learners of collocations of various frequencies extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC).”
Linguistic features in writing quality and development: An overview (2020, background): “…should be noted that L2 writers rely on a smaller number of phrases, do not produce as many native-like sequences as L1 writers (Chen & Baker, 2010; Durrant & Schmitt, 2009), and overuse phrases common in L1 speech while underusing academically appropriate n-grams (Chen & Baker, 2010;…”
The Word Associates Format: Validation evidence (2011, background): “This coincides well with various findings that nonnatives find collocations difficult, especially less frequent ones (Durrant and Schmitt, 2009; Granger and Meunier, 2008).”
Adult learners’ retention of collocations from exposure (2010, background): “This accords with evidence from learner-corpus research (Durrant and Schmitt, 2009), which has shown that advanced non-native speakers of English do make use of collocations that are likely to have been frequent in their input.”
How much collocation knowledge do L2 learners have?: the effects of frequency and amount of exposure (2015, background): “Rather, in line with Durrant and Schmitt (2009) and Ellis, et al. (2008), it seems that the frequency of the collocation as a whole is the more important factor for second language learning of collocations, although our results show that the relationship is only a moderate one with 20% co-variance.”
Lexical Sophistication as a Multidimensional Phenomenon: Relations to Second Language Lexical Proficiency, Development, and Writing Quality (2018, neutral): “Research has indicated that L2 learners tend to underuse n-grams with high MI scores (i.e., n-grams composed of lower frequency words) and overuse n-grams with high t-scores (i.e., n-grams composed of higher frequency words; Durrant & Schmitt, 2009).”
The effects of repetition and time of post-test administration on EFL learners’ form recall of single words and collocations (2014, neutral): “Not only do FL learners make more errors when producing collocations, previous findings also suggest that they tend to overuse some collocations (Durrant & Schmitt, 2009; Laufer & Waldman, 2011).”