The phraseological errors of French-, German-, and Spanish speaking EFL learners: Evidence from an error-tagged learner corpus

The value of learner corpora in the field of learner phraseology has been convincingly illustrated in a number of corpus studies (Granger 1998, Nesselhauf 2003, 2005, Paquot 2007). In addition, the growing attention paid to phraseological errors (Nesselhauf 2003, Osborne 2008, Wang and Shaw 2008) shows that phraseology still very much remains a linguistic “bete noire” even for the more advanced learners. In this study we look at several types of phraseological errors committed by three learner populations, viz. FrenchGermanand SpanishEFL learners. We do so by using a learner corpus which has been (a) fully error tagged, (b) divided into mother tongue backgrounds, (c) stratified into proficiency levels. This paper reports on two main analyses: (1) we provide an overview of several types of phraseological errors in the three learner populations by basing ourselves on the typology of phrasemes recently developed by Granger and Paquot (forthcoming 2008), (2) we then carry out an analysis of phraseological errors in terms of grammaticality vs acceptability errors (James 1998). The TaLC presentation itself will additionally look at the phraseological errors in the corpus (a) from the point of view of potential L1 influence, i.e. we determine how many phraseological errors in the three populations can be traced back to the learners’ L1, and (b) from the point of view of language proficiency, i.e. we investigate whether the number and type of phraseological errors differ according to the proficiency level.

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