Publications

Publication details [#59608]

[no author]. 2015. EFL and/vs. ESL? A multi-level regression modeling perspective on bridging the paradigm gap. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 1 (1) : 130–159.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ijlcr

Annotation

The study of learner language and that of indigenized varieties are growing areas of English-language corpus-linguistic research, which are shaped by two current trends: First, the recognition that more rigorous methodological approaches are urgently needed (with few exceptions, existing work is based on over-/under-use frequency counts that fail to unveil complex non-native linguistic patterns); second, the collective effort to bridge an existing “paradigm gap” (Sridhar & Sridhar 1986) between EFL and ESL research. This paper contributes to these developments by offering a multifactorial analysis of seventeen lexical verbs in the dative alternation in speech and writing of German/French learners and Hong Kong/India/Singapore English speakers. The paper exemplifies the advantages of hierarchical mixed-effects modeling, which allows to control for speaker and verb-specific effects, but also for the hierarchical structure of the corpus data. Second, it addresses the theoretical question of whether EFL and ESL represent discrete English varieties or a continuum.