THE USE OF THE HIGH FREQUENCY VERB MAKE IN OPINION ESSAYS BY VIETNAMESE EFL STUDENTS

Abstract

Much research has been devoted to how learners use diverse and sophisticated or low frequency words in their English as a foreign language (EFL) written language production. However, the question of how EFL students use high frequency words, especially common verbs such as have, get, make, etc., in EFL writing has remained underexplored, despite the fact that they occur frequently and constitute a large proportion of words in written texts (Nation, 2013). The present study therefore examined how Vietnamese EFL students used the high frequency verb MAKE in their written opinion essays. The freeware AntConc (Anthony, 2020) was used to identify the different forms of the target MAKE and their frequency in 200 opinion essays written by Vietnamese EFL university students in three English writing classes as progress tests. Each concordance line in the AntConc output was subsequently examined to discover patterns of uses of MAKE according to Altenberg and Granger’s (2001) framework. The results show that causative and delexical uses of MAKE were most common and students still committed errors with MAKE. The findings have important pedagogical implications for feedback giving and writing instruction.