Investigation of Verb–Noun Collocation Errors: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Academic Writing of ESL Learners at FGEI Schools, Pakistan

Abstract

The present study aims to explore syntactic and semantic collocation errors in the academic English writing of secondary-level English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in the Federal Government Educational Institutions (FGEI) school system in Pakistan. The analysis is built on the theoretical bases of the combinatorial taxonomy of lexical collocations by Morton Benson and the error analysis (EA) model by Pit Corder. It uses a corpus-driven methodology to diagnose the deviations in the structure of student writing and the interlingual effects on it. A specially created learner corpus of students’ academic essays on the environment for classes 6-10 was constructed, and a detailed diagnostic survey was administered to 100 students and 29 English language teachers from the FGEI network. The quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated that the density of collocational errors was relatively high, including article omission, verb choice, collocation constraints, verb simplification, incomplete collocation constraints, and limited academic vocabulary. The empirical results indicate that negative transfer (mother tongue interference) from Urdu and pedagogical emphasis on the rote learning of grammatical structure and memorization of isolated lexical items have a significant influence on the learner’s collocational competence. The results indicate that the current structural teaching mode for ESL academic writing should be replaced with an explicit, corpus-based approach to teaching lexical items, thereby enhancing the idiomaticity and clarity of academic writing among Pakistani ESL students.