Making sense of MAKE

1
Making sense of MAKE

• Xu Jiajin
• xujiajin_at_bfsu.edu.cn
• Beijing Foreign Studies University

2
Altenberg Granger (2001)

• The grammatical and lexical patterning of MAKE in
  native and non-native student writing.
• Applied Linguistics 22(2) 173-195.

3

• Why do we choose to study a single word like
  MAKE?
• Why do we choose MAKE as our object of
  investigation?
• Is it an arbitrary decision? Or any justification
  for this?

4
High frequency verbs

• Have/do/know/think/get/go/say/see/
• come/make/take/look/give/find/use
• They tend to be problematic for EFL learners.
• Error-proneness

5
Data and method
6
Why two learner corpora?

• To see whether the problem with MAKE is universal
  across all EFL learner.
• It might be specific to one mother-tongue
  background EFL learners (eg SW, FR, CN or JP).

7
A benchmark

• Native English corpus as a control or reference
  frame.

8
Machine hands

• An automatic and manual design
• Grammatical searchable
• Semantic and other functional aspects not
  searchable

9
Two key words

• Bear the two words in mind for a learner language
  analysis.
• If you wish to probe into a seemingly surface
  linguistic fact.
• Comparison and classification
• CIA ? multiple comparisons

10
Chi-squared test (X 2)

• It is a measure of statistical significance of
  difference.
• In CL, chi-square test measures the difference
  between the observed freq. and the
  expected/reference freq.

11
Chi-squared test (X 2)
(FO-FE)2

• X 2 ?

FE
12
One pair of observed expected/referenced

• Excel chi-square calculator
• X 2 NPOWER((ABS(AD)-BC_)-N/2),2)/((AB)(C_D)
  (AC_)(BD))
• N abcd
• ???/??? cross-tabulation

13
How can such research be extended?

• Make in China
• A Chinese replica

14
Internal variables

• Make as a transitive verb
• Intransitive verb
• Colligation, collocation and chunking
• Word class collocates
• Nominal collocates

15
External variables

• What factors influence the use of MAKE?
• Learners proficiency
• Does students proficiency influence their use of
  MAKE?
• Topic/Genre/Register
• Is MAKE a style-sensitive verb. Does the
  Frequency of MAKE appear differently in different
  genres of corpus.
• Proficiency level/Gender/Task types/Modes/Genres

16
Cross-genre design

• Spoken versus writing
• Do learners use more MAKEs in spoken discourse or
  written?
• In what way?

17
Possible research topics

• A developmental design
• The proficiency and learners behavior in using
  the verb.

18
A combined method

• A quantitative and qualitative combined approach.

19
Thank you

• xujiajin_at_bfsu.edu.cn