Using lexical bundles to teach prepositions to Korean EFL students

Abstract

Integrating corpus-based analyses with instructed SLA, this study explores how lexical bundles can be used to teach prepositions to EFL learners. It first identifies lexical bundles occurring most frequently with preposition errors in a learner corpus of L1-Korean high school student writing. It then uses the 10 identified bundles to compare three different types of instructional treatment: one hundred L1-Korean high school EFL students received either implicit instruction (teaching each bundle as a unit with no emphasis on embedded prepositions) or one of two types of explicit instruction (focusing on embedded prepositions with or without input enhancement). The explicit-instruction-with-input-enhancement group showed the greatest improvement, followed closely by the implicit-instruction group; the other explicit group showed the least improvement. These results suggest that textual enhancement can facilitate L2 preposition acquisition and that recurrent sequences such as lexical bundles can serve as a useful pedagogical means to teach linguistic forms.