The development of productive bigram knowledge in EFL: Exploring the bigram continuum
The development of productive bigram knowledge in EFL: Exploring the bigram continuum

Summary/Abstract: Using a written corpus of 529 texts, this study is the first to examine undergraduate university learners’ productive bigram knowledge in the Moroccan EFL context. Internationally, while previous research focused on strongly associated bigrams, the current study adopts a continuum perspective and examines strongly and moderately associated bigrams as well as wrong word combinations, using a cross-sectional approach with three adjacent groups. The analysis of strongly and moderately associated rare bigrams shows that learners tend to increase their MI mean score towards the production of more strongly associated bigrams, as we compare lower to upper proficiency groups. For frequent bigrams, the results show that there is a reversed effect of proficiency on learners’ performance as learners have a tendency to produce less fixed frequent combinations as they gain better proficiency, which suggests that they are using frequent word combinations in novel, more flexible ways. For wrong combinations, the three groups manage to form more accurate combinations as they move towards higher proficiency levels both when rare and frequent bigrams are considered. The results indicate that the development of phraseological knowledge follows a continuum trajectory. The study has implications for learning and teaching EFL.

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