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Quantifying The Development Of Phraseological Competence In L2 English Writing: An Automated Approach, Yves Bestgen, Sylviane Granger

Yves Bestgen

Based on the large body of research that shows phraseology to be pervasive in language, this study aims to assess the role played by phraseological competence in the development of L2 writing proficiency and text quality assessment. We propose to use CollGram, a technique that assigns to each pair of contiguous words (bigrams) in a learner text two association scores (mutual information and t-score) computed on the basis of a large reference corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Applied to the Michigan State University Corpus of second language writing, CollGram shows a longitudinal decrease in the use of collocations …