A Corpus-based Study on the Use of MAKE by Turkish EFL Learners

Abstract

This study examines the lexical and grammatical use of a high frequency verb ‘MAKE’ by Turkish EFL learners. Major goals are to investigate whether Turkish learners of English use MAKE appropriately in their argumentative essays and to see to what extent L1 transfer plays a role in such usage and to what extent different learner groups from  different L1s share common interlanguage features. Overuse, underuse and misuse of MAKE by learners and native speakers gathered by frequency calculations from native speakers’ and two learners’ corpora and comparison of them among each other constitute the quantitative backbone of the research. Results showed that Turkish learners have difficulty in the use of MAKE to a certain degree. Consequently, learners should be made aware of especially delexical and grammatical patterning of high frequency verbs in English such as MAKE and they should also be shown the difference in the use of these verbs between their L1 and L2.