The influence of movie conversation on Italian learners' collocations

Within the context of learner corpus research, collocations have acquired a rather important position, as the literature (Zhao 2005; Jafarpour and Koosha 2006; Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Groom 2009; Hao-Jan 2011; Granger and Bestgen 2014; Crossley et al. 2015; Siyanova-Chanturia 2015; among others) shows with an abundance of studies on them. The majority of these studies are based on written corpora due to a lack of spoken ones; thus, this contribution’s objective is to offer another perspective on collocations, especially from the point of view of spoken language. Furthermore, by adopting a contrastive analysis between the learner corpus and a corpus of movie language, this work aims to show the potential research that may be carried out within the American Movie Corpus (AMC): it could enable researchers to compare the learners’ interlanguage and identify the English variety of their target language; it could be used as a new and stimulating tool in data-driven learning (DDL) to teach students how to be more aware of their own interlanguage features; it could inform teachers on which structures are lacking in their students’ interlanguage; it could serve to teachers as a reference corpus for teaching English with a more communication-centered approach.