PREFABRICATED PATTERNS IN ADVANCED EFL WRITING: COLLOCATIONS AND LEXICAL PHRASES

Over the last decade, the use of prefabs has become a major focus of interest in EFL, arguably for three main reasons. Firstly, the emergence of the concept of lexico-grammar, inspired by Halliday and Sinclair, has promoted the syntagmatic investigation of lexis. The traditional association between syntagmatics and grammar, on the one hand, and paradigmatics and lexis, on the other, is a thing of the past. Secondly, corpus linguistics has played an important role, giving linguists the computational means to uncover and analyse lexical patterns. Rich information about word combinations can now be obtained with ease using text retrieval software. Finally, pragmatics has become a major field of study in its own right, in linguistics and now in EFL. Pragmatic competence has come to be viewed as an essential part of learners' competence. The formulaic nature of many pragmalinguistic rules has necessarily contributed to bringing the study of prefabs to the fore.