Word-Combination-Based Measures of Phraseological Diversity, Sophistication, and Complexity and Their Relationship to Second Language Chinese Proficiency and Writing Quality

This study investigated the relationship of a set of word-combination-based measures of phraseological diversity, sophistication, and complexity to second language (L2) Chinese proficiency and writing quality in comparison to that of a set of large-grained topic-comment-unit-based measures. Our dataset consisted of 101 assessed narratives produced by Korean learners of Chinese as a L2 at 3 proficiency levels. Multiple phraseological measures exhibited stronger correlations with quality ratings and/or larger effect sizes for proficiency than did the large-grained topic-comment-unit-based measures. Measures pertaining to language-specific features, including topic-comment-unit-based measures and phraseological measures based on language-specific word combination types, exhibited stronger discriminative power for intermediate and advanced levels than for beginning and intermediate levels. Our results also revealed the importance of predicate-related combinations in assessing L2 Chinese phraseological diversity and complexity. We discuss the implications of our findings for L2 Chinese writing research and L2 Chinese pedagogy.