The grammatical and lexical patterning of MAKE in native and non-native student writing

This article investigates EFL learner use of high frequency verbs, and in particular use of the verb MAKE, a major representative of this group. The main questions addressed are: do learners tend to over- or underuse these verbs? Are high-frequency verbs error-prone or safe? What part does transfer play in misuse of these verbs? To answer these questions, authentic learner data has been compared with native speaker data using computerized corpora and linguistic software tools to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The article focuses on what proves to be the two most distinctive uses of MAKE, viz. the delexical and causative uses. Results show that EFL learners, even at an advanced proficiency level, have great difficulty with a high frequency verb such as MAKE. They also demonstrate that some of these problems are shared by the two groups of learners under consideration (Swedish- and French-speaking learners) while others seem to be L1-related. In the conclusion, the pedagogical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions made for using concordance-based exercises as a way of raising learners' awareness of the complexity of high-frequency verbs.