Lexical verbs in academic writings of Turkish learners of English as a second language: A corpus based study

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interlanguage features of Turkish EFL learners in academic written discourse. Acquisition and usage of lexical verbs of Academic Keyword List (AKL) (Paqout, 2010) by Turkish EFL learner will be analysed. AKL covers the non-domain specific words which entitle the characteristics of academic texts and outline the basic academic sketch of the texts. It is assumed that the level of acquisition of these words that are defined under four basic lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives) will reveal the students' lexical repertoires of academic vocabularies as well as interpreting lexico-grammatical attributes specific to writers. Detailed analysis of lexical verbs may help researchers to define interlanguage features of Turkish EFL learners. The scope of this study includes conducting a corpus based analysis of verbs of AKL. For the purpose of this corpus based study, at the first level, comparison of TICLE (Turkish sub-corpus of International Corpus of Learner English) and the LOCNESS (The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) corpus was utilised to define general lexical profile of the learners by preparing frequency based list according to usage levels of the verbs in two corpora. At the second level, a detailed analysis of 10 verbs with the highest frequency was conducted within the frame of Pattern Grammar approach. Results indicate the overuse of some specific words by non-native students while some others are underused in comparison to native speakers of English. This investigation revealed the levels of students' implicit knowledge of these particular lexical items, their awareness of register of academic verbs and to what extent they are able to put in use these items within the frame of functional lexico-grammatical usage.