The comparison of the usage of prefabs in the academic writing of Estonian EFL learners and native English speakers

Abstract

Languages largely consist of prefabricated expressions (prefabs), more broadly known by the term formulaic language. Accumulating more data in this field of study benefits second- and foreign language acquisition, and more specifically, EFL learners’ comprehension and language production in terms of recognising and learning these formulaic patterns. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the usage of prefabs in written academic English between Estonian EFL learners and native English speakers. To achieve this, a corpus-based study was conducted, which utilised the corpus of Estonian Academic Learner English (EALE) and the corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE).