Productive collocation knowledge and advanced CEFR-levels in Swedish as a second language: A conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell, Lindqvist & Edmonds (2018)

Abstract

This study constitutes a conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell et al. (2018), who investigated whether productive collocation knowledge – a linguistic feature known to be indicative of high-level L2 proficiency – developed between the B2 and C1 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages scale in second-language (L2) French. The results showed significant development. The present study set out to replicate these findings in L2 Swedish, in order to investigate whether the reported development would stand cross-linguistic validation. To this end, a test of productive collocation knowledge in L2 Swedish was developed based on 22 separate computerized newspaper corpora of Swedish, searchable via the corpus tool Korp at SprakbankenText (Swedish Language Bank). The method of the item selection was identical to that of the Forsberg Lundell et al., but the replication could only be conceptual since the reference corpora are different, from different languages. The test was conducted comparing participants from B2 and C1 levels in Swedish (N = 60). The results replicated the original study, confirming a significant difference in productive collocation knowledge between the B2 and C1 levels. Furthermore, in addition to the replication, the study explored frequency and Mutual Information score as potential factors for collocation item difficulty. The study found no significant effects for frequency or for Mutual Information score. Finally, the impact of cross-linguistic similarity was also investigated, grouping the results for participants with Germanic and non-Germanic first languages. This analysis did not point to any noteworthy effects.