Effects of L2 usage and L1 transfer on Turkish learners’ production of English verb-argument constructions

Abstract

Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turkish, the Turkish National Corpus (TNC).

Input optimization: Verb-argument constructions in English textbooks in Türkiye

“…Studies also suggest that with increasing proficiency, the accuracy of constructional knowledge also increases (Bestgen & Granger, 2014;Crossley & Salsbury, 2011). In addition to this, there is evidence that L2 speakers' knowledge of constructions is also influenced by their L1 (Li et al, 2014;Goschler & Stefanowitsch, 2019;Gedik & Uslu, 2022;Römer & Yilmaz, 2019). There is strong evidence that advanced L2 speakers are also influenced by strongly entrenched verb-VAC combinations in their L1 (Gedik & Uslu, 2022;Goschler & Stefanowitsch, 2019).…”

Applied corpus linguistics for language acquisition, pedagogy, and beyond

“…Usage-based SLA I will start by highlighting three recent corpus studies that, I think, all contribute to a better understanding of SLA and have implications for language pedagogy. My co-author on the first study, published as Römer and Yilmaz (2019), is Selahattin Yilmaz. The study focuses on a set of 19 VACs in advanced Turkish learner writing in English.…”

“…The second study in this section on usage-based SLA was co-authored by Jamie Garner and appeared as Römer and Garner (2019). The study focuses on the use of five high-frequency VACs (a subset of the 19 VACs covered in Römer & Yilmaz, 2019) in L1 Italian and L1 Spanish learner English production. Different from the previous study, we here focus on spoken rather than written learner data, and on data from different proficiency levels rather than just advanced learner data.…”