Earticle

The present study reports the findings of a study that analyzed the use of formulaic sequences in an NNS corpus (i.e., EFL teaching demonstration data) and an NS corpus (i.e., MICASE data). In order to investigate the structural and functional aspects of formulaic expressions in English, the most frequent 4-word formulaic expressions were identified and classified both structurally and functionally. The result of the analysis demonstrates Korean EFL learners’ overuse of the formulaic sequences. In other words, the repeated use of the formulaic sequences resulted in the high frequency of formulaic sequences in the learners’ data. The analysis of formulaic sequences by the structural subcategories shows the high frequency of the clausal expressions, which is one of the major characteristics of spoken discourse. The present study also reports the results of the functional analysis of the formulaic sequences, which indicate that both native speakers and learners mainly employed formulaic sequences to express epistemic and modality stance.

The present study conducted a comparative analysis of use of evaluative adjectives in the essays of Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English. It discussed the characteristics of different types of evaluative adjectives, e.g., frequency, semantic categories, and collocational value of evaluative adjectives. The result of the frequency analysis demonstrates Korean EFL learners’ significant overuse of the limited types of the target items. The analysis of evaluative adjectives by semantic categories shows the similar tendency. For example, the repeated use of a small number of assessment adjectives resulted in the high frequency of adjectives in the assessment category. The present study also demonstrates the collocational associations between the selected evaluative adjectives and intensifiers in the corpus. The descriptive results of the analysis of collocational information indicate that learners employed a less formal/spoken style in the written corpus. As Blagoeva (2004) noted, the differences between the Korean EFL learners and native speakers of English in the characteristics of evaluative expressions might not directly obstruct communication but it is an indication that there is still much to be done in the development of second/foreign language skills.

In the past couple of decades, computer corpora and analysis tools or software programs have become increasingly accessible, and a great number of corpus-based studies have become progressively common in the field of applied linguistics. In line with this, there has been a growing interest and awareness that it is useful to investigate learner language by compiling a large amount of learner performance data on computer. Thus, a variety of studies on computer learner corpora (henceforth, CLC), which can be defined as electronic collections of written and/or spoken texts produced by non-native speakers of English, have started to play an outstanding role in the development of corpus linguistics for language teaching and learning. This paper describes the current state of CLC compilation and CLC-based studies regarding: (i) available collections of learner corpora and their major characteristics; (ii) learner corpus analyses and their essential techniques or methodologies; and (iii) pedagogical applications of CLC-based research in language teaching and learning. This study also mainly focuses on providing an idea of the wide range of applications of CLC and CLC-based studies to areas as interlanguage research and language teaching, especially within the data-driven learning (hereafter, DDL) approach.