I will write about: Investigating multiword expressions in prospective students’ argumentative writing

Multiword expressions are a contiguous series of words in a text. This study examines the phraseological profile based on multiword expressions in argumentative writings in a 120,000-word collection of nonnative prospective university students’ writing. The profile is compared with two sets of American university students’ writing from two corpora that comprise upper-level American university students’ course papers and argumentative essay texts. The data are investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the structure (i.e., noun, verb, and prepositional phrases) and function (i.e., stance, referential, and text organizer). The results show some noticeable differences among these sets of writing. The Korean student writers heavily relied on verb phrase-based expressions (e.g., are a lot of) in their writing whereas the American students preferred noun phrases. Functionally, the Korean writers underused referential function expressions (e.g., the idea of the) compared to their counterparts. In addition, the prospective Korean university students’ writing was found to represent the widest range of multiword expressions whereas the American students’ argumentative course papers exhibited the smallest range. The findings suggest that prospective Korean university students’ writing tends to use more features of verbal conversation while American university students’ writing exhibits features of structured argumentative writing. The implications for teaching writing and limitations of the study are discussed.