A Study on Instructed MWEs With Reference to the Movie After

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to observe how EFL learners use multiword expressions (MWEs) or multiword combinations (MWCs) in their writings. Three subjects participated in this writing activity. After, an American romantic drama film, was chosen as material. Three scenes, which were translated into Korean, were provided to the subjects. They were then assigned to write in English with the Korean compositions. The results indicated various information about the strategies of the subjects' use of MWEs. Subject A depended on one-word, two-word, or three-word utterances due to his lack of English grammatical knowledge. He simply showed sequences based on meaning relations. Subject B used phrase-long MWEs (P-MWEs) relatively more often and combined a P-MWE with another P-MWE to generate sentences. His grammatical knowledge motivated such combinations, but the sentences hardly looked natural. Subject C primarily used sentence-long MWEs. They seemed to make his composition effortless. Through these writing activities, it was found that MWCs can be developed to MWEs in the case of subject A and that grammar learning before MWCs or MWEs learning may be harmful to learn L2 naturalness in B's case, and that sentence-long MWEs should be an ultimate goal in C's case.