Tracking L2 writers’ phraseological development using collgrams: Evidence from a longitudinal EFL corpus

n the last decade learner corpus research has been characterized by a wide range of studies focused on phraseological aspects of learner language, in particular collocations (Nesselhauf 2005) and lexical bundles (Chen & Baker 2010). Most of these studies are cross-sectional, i.e. they compare learner populations at a particular point in time. Due to the lack of longitudinal corpora, very few studies have tracked the phraseological development of the same learners over an extended period of time. Fortunately, this is now beginning to change thanks to recent corpus collection initiatives launched with a view to filling that gap. In our presentation we will discuss the results of an investigation of the learner phrasicon based on the Longitudinal Database of Learner English1 (LONGDALE), a collection of spoken and written data produced by EFL learners over a period of three years. For our study we made use of a subcorpus consisting of 178 texts written by 89 French-speaking learners and containing approximately 100,000 words in total. Each learner contributed an argumentative essay in their first year at university (Y1) and another in their third year (Y3); the topics of the essays were the same in Y1 and Y3 to ensure maximum comparability.