Word frequency and collocation: Using children’s literature in adult learning

Abstract

This study involved the creation of a corpus of children’s literature spanning 5.5 million words. Using concordance software, the corpus was able to show the most frequent words and collocations. These will be of interest both to literary researchers in the genre of children’s literature and also teachers and applied linguists working with adult students of English.

Taking the corpus to the classroom: Using children’s stories to compare learner and native text

“…The most frequent collocation in the native corpus of children's stories is it was (Thomas 2015). It was is also a frequent collocation in the learner corpus, appearing 158 times.…”

“…The dummy copula chunk it was is extremely common amongst native storytellers (Thomas 2015), but one might expect L2 writers to avoid such usage due to its conceptually difficult and vague reference. On the contrary, the present study reveals that it was is often used correctly in a dummy fashion by L2 writers:…”

“…Variation between native and non-native language use can then offer insights for teaching practice. An analysis of a five-million-word corpus of children's stories (Thomas 2015) showed function words to be the most frequent (the, and, to, of, a), followed by verbs (was, had, said, is, be, have, were). Notably, the eighth most frequent content word was the adjective little, with common collocations including little girl, little boy, a little, little while, little more, little way, little bit, little longer and little later.…”

Frequencies and Collocations of Deictic Verb Come and Go

“…The type of grammatical collocation in the word go appeared more varied than the word come. It was because the word go is very commonly utilized by many people (Thomas, 2015).…”