Exploring the use of make + noun collocations by Japanese EFL learners through a bilingual essay corpus

Acquiring English collocations poses a major challenge for second language (L2) learners. It has been well noted that even advanced L2 English learners have difficulty using basic verb + noun collocations. Among the factors that make it difficult to acquire L2 collocations, the influence of learners’ first language (L1) has been repeatedly pointed out in the literature. As learners’ L1 and target language (L2) use data can help us to examine L1 influence effectively, in this study, we used a bilingual essay corpus, in which the same individuals ( n = 524) produced L1 and L2 essays on the same topic, to investigate the relationship between Japanese efl (English as a foreign language) learners’ L1 and their English collocation use in written essays. We also referred to essays written by native speakers of English on the same topic as a reference corpus ( n = 200). The proficiency level of 524 individuals in the learner corpus data was divided into three levels according to the Common European Framework of Reference (cefr): A2 (Waystage), B1 (Threshold) and B2 (Vantage). We focussed on the use of ‘ make + noun’ collocations as the target structure in this study and extracted them from the two corpora. Results suggest that, although the differences between the learner levels were not found to be statistically significant, the learners underused make + noun collocations with less variation, compared with native speakers of English. The pedagogical implications of this finding are discussed in terms of materials and syllabus development for efl learners.