Abstract
There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual information scores) and the intuitive judgements of L2 comprehensibility (i.e. ease of understanding). The topic was approached from the angles of different task conditions (Study 1), rater background (first language or L1 vs. second language or L2) (Study 2) and cross-sectional vs. longitudinal analyses (Study 3). The findings showed that: (1) collocation emerged as a medium-to-strong determinant of L2 comprehensibility in structured (picture description) compared to free (oral interview) oral production tasks; (2) with sufficient immersion experience, L2 raters can demonstrate as much sensitivity to collocation as L1 raters; and (3) conversational experience is associated with more coherent and mutually-exclusive combinations of words in L2 speech, resulting in greater L2 comprehensibility development.
Highlights
Whereas scholars have begun to examine the lexical characteristics of second language (L2) speech which can be judged to be fluent (Tavakoli and Uchihara, 2020), comprehensible and contextually appropriate (Saito, 2020), and highly proficient (Kyle and Crossley, 2015), the existing literature has suggested the use of multiword units as a key factor when assessing L2 vocabulary
While many previous studies have been concerned with the role of phonological errors in perceived comprehensibility (e.g. Kang et al, 2010), the current study aimed to explore the relationship between vocabulary use and L2 comprehensibility
We first examined the predictive role of four different collocation measures in L2 comprehensibility judgements at T1 and T2 by conducting a set of partial correlations controlling for text length
Summary
Whereas scholars have begun to examine the lexical characteristics of second language (L2) speech which can be judged to be fluent (Tavakoli and Uchihara, 2020), comprehensible and contextually appropriate (Saito, 2020), and highly proficient (Kyle and Crossley, 2015), the existing literature has suggested the use of multiword units (collocations) as a key factor when assessing L2 vocabulary. In this investigation, we aim to Second Language Research 00(0). There is some corpus research showing that multiword combinations make up approximately half of written and spoken English (Erman and Warren, 2000), and are characteristic of oral discourse among native speakers (Biber et al, 1999), such estimates may vary as per scholars’ definitions and operationalizations of collocation
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