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Research states that when deciding what target lexical items to focus in their syllabi, textbook designers tend to use their intuition and establish their framework for vocabulary teaching accordingly rather than using a systematic method. With the advent of computational methods for language analysis, contemporary EFL publishers also claim they have begun to design corpus-informed textbooks reflecting actual language use in their products as evidenced in a representative corpus. In an attempt to offer a more rational method to form corpus-oriented and pedagogically convenient target vocabulary lists, the present study, exploiting different association measures in a representative corpus, seeks to detect the collocational strength of 50 target word combinations presented in the two EFL textbooks as an initial step. Additionally, inspired by Ellis et al.’s (2008) research, the current study aims to investigate if/to what extent the association measures indicating collocational strength correlate with EFL instructors’ intuitions regarding collocational frequency. The results indicate that EFL instructors’ collocational frequency intuitions correlate strongly with an objective collocational frequency measure (t-score). The findings are likely to guide decision makers in tertiary level schools in constructing their vocabulary syllabi and designing materials for teaching collocations in particular.

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The poetry of the First World War bears poignant testimony to the unprecedented tragedies of human destructiveness. It has been the subject of numerous studies that looked at it from diverse perspectives, drawing from various contemporary psychological, historical, and literary theories. The present study can be regarded as yet another contribution to the existing picture of this rich and enduring field where literature and history are explored alongside. Informed by the emerging field of digital literary studies, this article aims to revisit the war experience through a computational analysis of the poetry of the Great War and explore how soldier-poets conveyed their emotions in the face of traumatic war experience. We adopted a top-down corpus-driven approach that moved from key semantic domains to lexical items and then to their collocates. First, we detected the key semantic domains of the genre through a corpus tool, Wmatrix. ‘Anatomy and physiology’, ‘religion and the supernatural’, and ‘senses’ were identified as the key semantic domains in our corpus. The unusual abundance of binaries led us to group and treat these lexical items as a separate category: ‘binary oppositions’. In the second phase of the research, we analysed these key semantic domains to foreground the frequent lexical items under each domain and explored the surrounding context of those items through their collocational networks exploiting another corpus tool, Lancsbox. Finally, we further investigated the frequent items and corresponding concordance lines to identify the common stylistic features in the Great War Poetry.

Studies to date using corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches have investigated the collocational links in both the L1 and L2 brain from different angles. They have attempted to test the role collocations play in the mental lexicon and question how corpus data can guide us in our investigations. However, there have been almost no attempts to explore the relationship between the L1 Turkish users' subjective judgements of collocational use (frequency) and the association strength of collocational items in Turkish evidenced in representative corpora. This research, mainly with a corpuslinguistic approach, aims to (a) detect the possible relationship between the collocational links in the L1 Turkish mental lexicon and the collocational frequency profiles on the TNC (Turkish National Corpus) (b) and thus question if L1 speaker intuitions (familiarity) regarding collocational frequency and the frequency profiles of the items, as evidenced through representative corpora, can/should be exploited in an attempt to create target vocabulary lists or vocabulary teaching materials for teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The results indicate that the collocational links in L1 Turkish users' mental lexicon seem to resemble the lexical associations represented in the TNC. To be more precise, higher Delta-P (1 > word 2) scores are associated with stronger collocational intuitions. Additionally, the Delta-P (1 > word 2) as well as the CEFR 1 level are significant predictors of subjective judgements for frequent collocational use. The results have been discussed in light of the psycholinguistic research highlighting collocational processing, and some pedagogical conclusions have been drawn.