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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.324-341
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 24 Mar 2023 Revised 12 Apr 2023 Accepted 19 Apr 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202304.324

Lexical Frames and Errors in the Use of English Definite Article in L2 Academic Writing: A Case of English Placement Test

Haeyun Jin
Visiting Researcher, Center for Educational Research, Seoul National University, Tel: 02-880-8834 haeyunj415@gmail.com


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of lexical frames in L2 academic writing across writing skill levels focusing on both the target-like frames and ungrammatical frames due to article errors. Writing samples were academic essays (N=991) composed of two levels from the corpus of the English Placement Test (EPT) compiled at a Midwestern US university. The 20 realized academic writing frames (referred to as AW-frames) were searched for in the lower- and higher-level sub-corpora and compared in three aspects. First, the differences in the overall frequencies of the frames were explored based on normalization and chi-square tests. Then, the variability and predictability of the retrieved frames in the two levels were compared using Gray and Biber’s (2013) framework. Lastly, the cases of errors in the definite article were analyzed for both the realized and unrealized frames. The results suggested meaningful differences in the AW-frames identified in lower versus higher-level writing. First, higher-level learners employed AW-frames more frequently compared to lower-level learners. Second, higher-level learners tended to employ highly variable AW-frames in an unpredictable manner whereas less proficient learners incorporated the same inventory of frames in a comparatively fixed and predictable way. In terms of the misused frames, regardless of levels, L2 learners produced extensive errors in the definite article, particularly having a problem using the non-nominal head for the definite article within realized frames. Taken together, by applying the lexical-frame approach to L2 phraseology, this study helps us gain a better understanding of how L2 learners’ productive use of multiword expressions differs across writing skill levels. It also provides implications for the teaching of AW-frames to improve L2 academic writing.

Keywords:

lexical frame, L2 phraseology, L2 academic writing, definite article, error analysis

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