Resumen

The study of native language corpora has shown that language presents repeated strings of words across texts and contexts, which might indicate that much more of language is patterned around clusters of words than was originally thought. The concept of the lexicon as made up of words in isolation is slowly giving way to a different perspective which has as its units recurrent sequences of words, some of which performing as discourse organizers. In this article we analyse a corpus of 237 academic essays (114,514 words) written by Spanish-speaking advanced learners of English at Comahue University in order to characterize their use of certain discourse-organizing formulaic sequences. First, an overview of the major changes in perspective is offered with respect to depth of knowledge of vocabulary, the nature of the lexicon and the role of lexis in language. Then, the learner corpus of formulaic sequences (FSs) is described in terms of the context, the corpus description and the selection of FSs. Results are presented for each of the selected FSs and compared to occurrences of those same strings in the British National Corpus. Finally, in the light of this study’s findings some suggestions for the teaching of vocabulary are provided that will contribute to learners’ acquisition of large chunks of language.