Phraseological indices of writing proficiency at the B2 vs. C1 levels in an ESP learner corpus: Implications for language testing for academic purposes

Paquot, Magali [UCL]

The main objective of this presentation is to demonstrate on the basis of learner corpus data that phraseology deserves a much more prominent role in language assessment, especially when it comes to assessing more advanced levels of proficiency in academic settings. Phraseological competence is approached via a number of corpus-based methods, more particularly a co-occurrence analysis that relies on association measures to identify statistically salient collocations. The learner texts used come from the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA) and consist in 98 research papers written by French EFL learners in the context of BA and MA linguistics courses. Each of the learner texts was assigned a grade ranging from B2 to C2 according to the CEFR by two professional raters (plus a third one in case of substantial disagreement). It will be shown that phraseological indices are better discriminators of proficiency level for academic texts written by L2 writers in content courses than traditional measures of syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. The proposed phraseological indices of proficiency are also better able to tap into the characteristics of academic writing (including genre specificities).