Exploring Arab learners’ use of lexical collocations of English: A corpus-based study

Abstract

This PhD thesis focuses on investigating the use of four different lexical collocations by Arab English foreign language learners (Arab EFLLs) from Kuwait and Dubai, and native British English students (NBESs) from the UK. The four types of collocation are the Adverb-Adjective, Verb-Noun, Verb-Adverb, and Adjective-Noun collocations. The main objective of this research is to identify issues with the use of lexical collocations by Arab EFLLs, who often struggle to produce natural collocations due to the influence of their L1. The study uses a corpus-based frequency approach to analyze data collected from two comparable corpora consisting of academic essays from both native speakers of British English and Arab EFLLs. The corpus data for Arab EFLLs is derived from two corpora, the Arabic Learner English Corpus (ALEC) and the BUiD Arab Learner Corpus (BALC), while the corpus data for native speakers is collected from the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE). The log-likelihood statistical test was used to identify significantly different collocations between Arab EFLLs and NBESs. The research also employed a contrastive error analysis approach to understand the difficulties that Arab EFLLs face when using lexical collocations. This study provides valuable insights into the use of lexical collocations by Arab EFLLs and highlights the impact of Arabic on their use of collocations in academic writing. The findings of this research can be used to develop targeted interventions that can help Arab EFLLs improve their use of lexical collocations in their academic essays.