The creation and evaluation of a grammar pattern list for the most frequent academic verbs

Abstract

The current research project was designed according to the conceptualization that vocabulary knowledge is multidimensional (Jaen, 2007; Qian & Schedl, 2004) and the learning of grammatical and collocational patterns should be considered as important as, if not more important than, the acquisition of semantic knowledge of single words. The purposes of the project were to (1) propose a method of extracting grammar patterns for the most frequent content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs) in a given corpus; and (2) derive a tentative grammar pattern list for the 115 most frequent academic verbs.The extraction of grammar patterns was realized through a rule-based programming approach, where the researchers coded all possible patterns of the most frequent academic verbs and used the script to extract grammar patterns from a given corpus. The extracted grammar patterns were compiled with corpus-based frequency information and developed into a grammar pattern list for the top-frequency academic verbs. The grammar pattern list is expected to complement the widely used EAP (English for academic purposes) word list, the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014), by specifying the frequency of each verb patterns (e.g. provide n with n, select n from n, base n on n).