A multiword unit analysis: COCA multiword unit list 20 and ColloGram

Abstract

Multiword units receive attention as being an essential part of vocabulary knowledge that will expedite the learning of an L2. However, there is lack of a graded multiword units (MWU) list that can offer direct applications for pedagogy, syllabus design or materials development. The current article aims to report on the development and evaluation of COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) Multiword Unit 20 (COCA_MWU20) where the notion of MWU family is adopted. The compilation involved selecting and grading the MWU by grammatical well-formedness, range, and frequency. The 10,000 MWU families which made up the list were utilized in the development of ColloGram, a list-based MWU family analysis program. The COCA_MWU20 can be expected to help L2 learners increase their knowledge of lexical items beyond single words and ColloGram is the first of the kind that can analyze multiword items based on COCA. For researchers, the ColloGram can also be a tool for identifying MWU that may appear in a target text.