Comparative Study of Delexical Verbs in an EFL Learner Corpus

Abstract

Focusing on the delexical-verb construction, the present study aims at analyzing the essays by Korean college students and comparing the data with those from corpora of native speakers of English. Korean EFL college students are assumed to underuse or misuse the delexical verb structure compared with that of native speakers of English. Results reveal that Korean college EFL learners not only underuse the target structure but also use different nouns preceded by the target verbs. The study also conducts a test of verb phrase preference to see if the participants prefer a single verb to multi-word forms with delexical verbs. It finds that the participants regardless of their proficiency prefer to use a single-verb form rather than a multi-word form. From these results, the study concludes that L2 teachers should pay more attention to the collocation constructions with delexical verbs in their teaching and materials and they need to take a more explicit approach to teaching collocations. Several pedagogical suggestions such as concordancing activities are also made to raise Korean EFL learners’ awareness of delexical-verb structures in general.