Phraseology of EAP vocabulary in advanced learner writing: the role of transfer

Comparisons of native and learner corpora of academic writing have highlighted a number of features of non-nativeness or 'unconventionality' in the phraseology of EFL students (Flowerdew 1998, 2003; De Cock 2003; Granger 1998; Nesselhauf 2004). Most of these studies have pointed to the potential influence of the mother tongue on learners' multi-word sequences but very few have tackled the issue systematically and examined the conditions under which multi-word sequences are most potentially transferable. The aim of this study is to examine the potential influence of the mother tongue on learners' production of both correct and incorrect multi-word sequences that fulfil organizational or rhetorical functions typically prominent in academic writing, e.g. contrasting ('on the other hand', 'in contrast to', 'X differs significantly from Y'), exemplifying ('for example', 'X is an example of Y'), concluding ('in conclusion', 'it can be concluded that'). The study uses Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework for identifying influence from the learners' mother tongue (L1). The investigation focuses on intra-L1-group similarities, inter-L1-group differences and L1-interlanguage (IL) performance similarities in learners' use of the phraseological patterns of words extracted from a newly compiled productively-oriented academic word list (Paquot forthcoming). The learner data consist of eleven sub-corpora of the 'International Corpus of Learner English' (Granger et al. 2002). Each sub-corpus comprises untimed argumentative essays written by higher-intermediate to advanced EFL university students of one particular mother tongue background, e.g. French, German, and Dutch. Large collections of comparable texts in the learners' mother tongues are used to investigate L1-IL performance similarities