Collocations play an important role in L2 learners’ fluent and idiomatic language production. Previous studies using a frequency-based approach to studying collocations underscored the potential to use association measures for distinguishing L2 writing proficiency. However, studies in this line have largely neglected the syntactic relation of words within a collocation. In addition, most L2 collocation studies have focused on learners at upper-intermediate levels and above, leaving the use of collocations by beginner-level learners understudied. Using the Yonsei English Language Corpus, this study investigated frequency (measured by normalized frequency and normalized deviance of proportions), formulaicity (measured by mutual information and t-scores), and diversity (measured by normalized entropy scores) of seven lexical collocations and four grammatical collocations in argumentative essays from beginning to upper-intermediate levels. Results showed that upper-intermediate L2 learners used more collocations with higher association strength and diversity than did beginning-level learners. In addition, collocations used by upper-intermediate learners were more idiomatic and suitable for L2 academic writing. The findings indicated that specific collocational patterns (i.e. adverb-verb and verb-preposition) could serve as reliable indicators of distinguishing beginning L2 writing from upper-intermediate L2 writing.

Lexical bundles are frequently recurring word sequences (e.g. as can be seen) that function as building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study examined the use of four-word lexical bundles in business emails written by three groups of writers: intermediate business English learners, advanced business English learners, and working professionals. The prominent structural and functional characteristics of lexical bundles expressed in business emails were identified and compared across the three groups. The results showed that lexical bundles were related to the extent to which formality and politeness were expressed in written business communications. The advanced business English learners and working professionals used more structural and functional characteristics of lexical bundles that are characteristic of written conventions than did intermediate business English learners. Both intermediate and advanced learner groups used functionally different lexical bundles from those produced by the working professionals.

A phrase-frame (p-frame) is a multi-word sequence with a one-word variable within the sequence (e.g., it is * to). P-frames are important components of language production and can demonstrate phraseological patterning. This study examined p-frames retrieved from one learner business emails corpus (1,413 texts based on the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database) and one working professional email corpus (1,145 texts from the Enron email dataset). P-frames were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of their structural characteristics, functional characteristics, and variability. Our results showed that the working professionals and the learners of business English used p-frames differently. The working professionals used p-frames in ways that aligned with written conventions, whereas the learners of business English used p-frames in ways that did not accord well with written conventions. This difference was detected by comparing tendencies in function-word frames and frames for referential function. In addition, p-frames used by the working professionals displayed a higher degree of variability than those by the learners of business English. This study facilitates an understanding of learners’ p-frame use in English for business purposes and suggests that p-frames be incorporated into the teaching and learning of L2 business writing.

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