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Language Learning - 2024 - Köylü - Longitudinal Development of Holistic Formulaicity Formulaic Sequences and Lexical

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Language Learning - 2024 - Köylü - Longitudinal Development of Holistic Formulaicity Formulaic Sequences and Lexical

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Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333

EMPIRICAL STUDY

Longitudinal Development of Holistic

Formulaicity, Formulaic Sequences, and
Lexical Complexity in Sojourner Diaries:
A Dynamic Usage-Based Perspective
Zeynep Köylü ,a Nurullah Eryılmaz,b
Carmen Pérez-Vidal ,c Marjolijn Verspoor ,d
e
and Hana Gustafsson
a
University of Basel b International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement
c
Universitat Pompeu Fabra d University of Pannonia, Hungary; University of Groningen
e
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract: Because of authentic exposure, study-abroad sojourners are expected to be-

come more proficient in terms of holistic formulaicity (defined as targetlike language
use of intensifiers, fillers, multiword sequences, lexical features, verb–argument con-
structions, pragmatic and discourse features, and so on), use of formulaic sequences,
and lexical measures. This study traces the development of these constructs over time

CRediT author statement – Zeynep Köylü: conceptualization; methodology; investigation; formal

analysis; writing – original draft preparation; writing – review and editing. Nurullah Eryılmaz:
formal analysis; writing – review and editing. Carmen Pérez-Vidal: data collection; writing –
original draft preparation (literature review, discussion); writing – review and editing. Marjolijn
Verspoor: writing – original draft preparation (literature review, discussion); writing – review and
editing. Hana Gustafsson: writing – original draft preparation (literature review); writing – review
and editing.
A one-page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in
the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis-database.org
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Zeynep Köylü, Uni-
versity of Basel, Department of English, Nadelberg 6 4051 Basel, Switzerland. Email:
[email protected]
The handling editor for this article was Annarita Magliacane.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom-
mercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the orig-
inal work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are
made.

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 1

© 2024 The Author(s). Language Learning published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Language
Learning Research Club, University of Michigan.
DOI: 10.1111/lang.12680
14679922, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lang.12680 by Morocco Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [24/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Köylü et al. Sojourners’ L2 Formulaicity & Lexical Development

in written diary texts of 26 Catalan/Spanish bilingual sojourners in an Anglophone

country during study abroad. It adopts a dynamic usage-based perspective, underlining
the importance of frequency of exposure and individual variability in developmental
trajectories. Generalized additive mixed model analyses, which take individual nonlin-
ear behavior into account, showed significant gains toward holistic formulaicity, but not
in use of formulaic sequences nor in lexical complexity measures. We argue that at ad-
vanced stages some measures may have reached ceiling, but that sojourners may still
progress in becoming more finely attuned to the conventionalized ways of saying things
in the speech community.

Keywords study abroad; formulaicity; lexical complexity; dynamic usage-based per-

spective

Introduction
A study-abroad (SA) context may provide high amounts of repeated, contex-
tualized, and meaningful second language (L2) input informing learners about
the social and cultural aspects of language use and nativelike idiomaticity in
the target language (TL) environment (Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008, p. 447).
The current study thus explores L2 development in terms of measures such as
holistic formulaicity, use of formulaic sequences, and lexical measures. Holis-
tic formulaicity is defined as a combination of intensifiers, fillers, multiword
sequences, collocations, idiomatic phrases, verb–argument constructions, and
pragmatic and discourse features: all that is typically used by a first language
(L1) speaker. Formulaic sequences are defined as multiword sequences of
the kinds used most frequently by L1 speakers. Lexical measures are defined
in terms of diversity, sophistication, density, and relative frequency. In this
study, we assess holistic formulaicity through human judgment, and formulaic
sequences with automated analyzers, to explore sojourner diaries for L2 de-
velopment, complementing this with the examination of lexical development.
In terms of theoretical framework, we draw on a dynamic usage-based
(DUB) perspective, a combination of usage-based linguistics, which holds
that language is a large array of conventionalized utterances that are acquired
through exposure (Langacker, 2008; Schmid, 2020), and complex dynamic sys-
tems theory (CDST), a theory of change (van Geert, 1991). A CDST view
holds that even if individuals receive the same amount of instruction in and/or
exposure to the L2, they follow their own unique trajectories, which cannot be
generalized to a population (Lowie & Verspoor, 2019). Therefore, to study the
actual process of development, studies within a CDST framework analyze sin-
gle cases (sometimes in small groups of participants) in longitudinal designs
through the inspection of dense data (e.g., biweekly over 2 years; Fogal, 2022).

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 2

So far DUB studies have examined different dimensions of L2 performance—

such as syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and occasionally fluency—
along with holistic performance scores (Lowie & Verspoor, 2019). However,
within this strand, holistic formulaicity and formulaic sequences or the use
of multiword constructions have so far received limited attention (Gustafsson
& Verspoor, 2017). Our study investigates advanced learners’ further L2 de-
velopment during a semester abroad through nonlinear modeling techniques,
in accord with an earlier methodological plea in the field (Ortega & Byrnes,
2008). In what follows, we describe findings on L2 development in a SA con-
text, outline the DUB theoretical framework, and then describe our approach
to investigating development in holistic formulaicity, formulaic sequences, and
lexical complexity.

Background Literature
The Study-Abroad Context
SA programs are popular due to the common belief that sojourners, regardless
of their initial level of proficiency, will improve their L2 during SA: a belief
probably encouraged as a marketing strategy and in need of further investiga-
tion (Güvendir et al., 2021). However, research has shown that a threshold level
of competence (mostly a pre-intermediate to lower intermediate level) is key
to development during SA (Collentine, 2009; DeKeyser, 2007; Pérez-Vidal,
2014; Köylü, 2023). In contrast, advanced learners have probably reached a
plateau and stabilized their interlanguage (Flynn & O’Neil, 1988; Han, 2004;
Osborne, 2007), so that not much change in their L2 might be expected with
further instruction or sojourn experience. In this respect, DeKeyser (2007,
2014) repeatedly argues that advanced learners need more time for progress
to become apparent. Still, an immersion context should provide a wealth of
opportunities for learners to develop their L2 even at advanced levels (Pérez-
Vidal, 2014), but which aspects are positively influenced is still disputatious
(Borrás & Llanes, 2021; Pérez-Vidal & Llanes, 2021).
Research into the effects of SA periods spent in the TL country has grown
exponentially over the past three decades. Cross-sectional and longitudinal
studies such as Languages and Social Networks Abroad (LANGSNAP;
Mitchell et al., 2017) and Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA;
Pérez-Vidal, 2014) have also added to our knowledge about learners’ linguistic
development while abroad. Both these research programs set out to investigate
context effects, in the wake of Collentine and Freed’s seminal 2004 publication
on the topic, through longitudinal, multiple-measure, and mixed-methods
studies with a large sample size representing the Erasmus student population

3 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

learning English, French, and Spanish (Erasmus being the European Union’s
student exchange program). Such a rich body of data has allowed researchers
to conduct a series of meta-analyses (Güvendir et al., 2024; Tseng et al., 2024;
Xu, 2019; Yang, 2016) as well as a recent all-round critical appraisal of the
methods used in the examination of the effects of SA periods (Pérez-Vidal
& Sanz, 2023). With regard to nonlinguistic development, the field has en-
compassed in-depth analyses of newly identified individual features such as
identity, interculturality, personality, emotions, or social networks (Sanz &
Front-Morales, 2018; Mitchell & Tyne, 2022).
Such an array of studies has revealed that overall learners develop signifi-
cantly more through SA, either short or long, than through immersion at home.
Moreover, the SA context is shaped by the type of program offered to students,
which in turn conditions the opportunities for contact with local speakers and
the amount of input potentially available of which they can avail themselves.
The above-mentioned meta-analyses reveal that the program features associ-
ated with such progress include taking language courses and having signed
some kind of language pledge or commitment to use the TL while abroad.
This is precisely the case of the learners in the current study, who participated
in a 4-month-long Erasmus mobility scheme in an Anglophone country.
Participation in the Erasmus program typically involves a student traveling on
their own, finding their own accommodation, taking pre-established courses
at the host university with the local students, integrating into the local com-
munity, and even trying to find some work. It has been argued that these are
optimal conditions for progress to be made (Peréz-Vidal, 2014). It is under
such circumstances that our participants were writing the diaries analyzed
hereafter.
Turning to linguistic development, the accumulated evidence points to
significant progress in listening comprehension and oral fluency (see Borràs &
Llanes, 2021, for an overview). Significant gains are also obtained for lexical
complexity, that is, density, diversity, and sophistication. Pragmatics, as mea-
sured through speech act reception and production, and humor and identity
construction, also shows significant progress (Pérez-Vidal & Shively, 2019;
Taguchi, 2018). In contrast, mixed findings are often obtained for morphology,
syntactic complexity, and lexical accuracy (Köylü & Tracy-Ventura, 2022).
With regard to the focus of the current study, Zaytseva et al. (2021) explored
vocabulary growth in terms of nativelike selections, following Foster (2009),
by comparing oral and written SALA data. The authors found that gains
were larger for oral than for written lexical complexity. In writing, learners
significantly progressed in their use of more nativelike general statements

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 4

(e.g., using pronouns or referents rather than naming a specific person or thing
as in Anyone who knows coding can help) and adverbial intensifiers, although
they still had a restricted lexical repertoire. In their oral production, they
used fewer cognates, their collocational accuracy grew, and they employed
larger numbers of lexicalized fillers (I mean, I’d say) and targetlike adverbs
(really, basically, actually). It is clear that learners’ language may change over
time in a short-term sojourn context, perhaps not in terms of all traditional
complexity, accuracy, and fluency measures, but more in terms of some lexical
measures and especially in nativelike (or conventionalized) ways of saying
things, which may include fillers, intensifiers, and collocations. Therefore, it
is of interest to study L2 development in the SA context longitudinally from a
DUB perspective in order to see how nativelike language emerges.

The Dynamics of L2 Development in a Usage-Based Account

This study is conducted from a DUB perspective, whose core tenets are the
individual variability in language development (the dynamic aspect) and the
interconnection of the different language subsystems (the usage-based aspect;
Verspoor & Behrens, 2011). A DUB perspective would suggest that usage
events (i.e., exposure and use) are key to figuring out regularities and pat-
terns and acquiring constructions (Ellis et al., 2015) through form–meaning
mappings, thanks to the use of cognitive processes such as analogy and
schematization (Verspoor & Behrens, 2011). This perspective also suggests
that formulaic sequences with routine functional purposes are significant
in L2 acquisition as constructions emerge from formulae (i.e., chunks as
meaning-based linguistic units; Ellis et al., 2015). The amount and quality
of input thus play a huge role in this process, foregrounding the significance
of the type of context where learners engage in usage events (cf. Schmid,
2020). In essence, if learners encounter a structure frequently, it becomes more
entrenched and is acquired without much effort, no matter how complex it is
(Kyle, Crossley, & Verspoor, 2021). A learning environment that is in principle
rich in authentic meaningful input and interaction opportunities, such as the
SA context, might aid and accelerate L2 acquisition, especially—because of
the authentic exposure—in the realm of formulaicity.
Within the field of L2 development, longitudinal research on advanced
learners is still rather scarce (Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), with a few stud-
ies focusing on what counts as “longitudinal,” whether and how learners
attain “advancedness” mostly in instructed settings, and which methodolo-
gies can best capture advanced development in the long run (Ortega &
Byrnes, 2008, pp. 7–8). In the only empirical study taking a DUB perspective,

5 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Köylü et al. (2023) investigated how syntactic complexity developed over a

semester of sojourn through the analysis of the same data set used in the present
study, as part of a larger project. Confirming much individual variation across
the L2 performance dimensions measured, the results indicated that the so-
journer participants ended up using words with fewer verb phrases in more
embedded, elaborated sentence structures, similar to those of L1 writers in
terms of syntactic elaboration.
It is assumed that sojourners, like all learners, will have their individual
learning paths due to sensitivity to initial conditions (e.g., initial proficiency,
bi- or multilingual upbringing), individual differences (e.g., language aptitude,
age of onset), and environmental variables (learning context, amount of input
and interaction available that learners avail themselves of). Moreover, tasks
and topics may affect the use of linguistic constructions. Therefore, we expect
individual nonlinear trends in L2 development, but we do not rule out group
tendencies. The current study focuses on such trends through the use of non-
linear analysis techniques.

Holistic Formulaicity
Pawley and Syder (1983) pointed out that a native speaker has the ability to
convey meaning by means of expressions that are not only grammatical, but
also natural and idiomatic when considered as options from among a range of
grammatically accurate paraphrases. Similarly, Langacker (2008), the founder
of usage-based linguistics, pointed out that nativelike language consists of con-
ventionalized expressions that go beyond the use of idioms, collocations, for-
mulaic sequences, and lexical items. Langacker’s concept of “particular ways
of phrasing certain notions out of all the ways they could in principle be ex-
pressed in accordance with lexicon and grammar of the language” (2008, p. 84)
is clearly linked to concepts such as “preferred ways of saying things” (Sinclair,
1991) and “routines” in nativelike selections (Foster, 2009), and this notion of
formulaicity is quite broad.
In addition to collocational accuracy, this construct may include native-
like verb–argument constructions or general statements; the use of adverbial
intensifiers; the use of lexicalized fillers such as I mean and I’d say; and the
targetlike use of adverbs such as really, basically, and actually (Zaytseva et al.,
2021). Also, the preceding and succeeding textual context, morphosyntactic
choices (e.g., choice of tense and voice), and pragmatic features add formu-
laicity (Smiskova-Gustafsson et al., 2012). This construct may also include
other discourse features, such as repetition, that are not necessarily quantifi-
able but will make a L2 writer sound more or less like a L1 writer. Finally and

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 6

most importantly, this notion of formulaicity includes knowledge of when and

how to use sequences appropriately. For example, Erman et al. (2018, p. 108)
showed that even though high-level L2 users may produce similar quantities
of multiword sequences in an oral task compared to L1 speakers, they do not
always use them appropriately for a particular pragmatic situation.
Thus, we argue that the concept of formulaicity is very broad and may
subsume not only multiword sequences, formulaic sequences, collocations, id-
iomatic phrases, and lexical features, but also intensifiers, fillers, and prag-
matic and discourse features, all used as a L1 speaker is most likely to use
them. The concept is therefore probably more than the sum of its parts, and
thus we coined the term “holistic formulaicity,” which is further explained in
the Method section. In our study, within a SA context, which potentially pro-
vides high amounts of repeated, contextualized, and meaningful L2 input, we
would expect holistic formulaicity to improve.

Formulaic Sequences
One very prominent and ubiquitous aspect of holistic formulaicity is formu-
laic sequences, which can be defined in a range of ways, depending on one’s
research objectives and overall perspective on language (Wray, 2002). Vari-
ous terms are used to refer to formulaic sequences in the literature, such as
fixed expressions, lexicalized phrases, prefabricated routines, multiword con-
structions (Siyanova-Chanturia & Pellicer-Sanchez, 2018, p. 2), memorized
phrases, chunks, collocations, or formulas/formulae (Foster, 2009, p. 91).
The use of formulaic sequences can be researched through a corpus-driven
approach (Biber, 2000), based on measures of collocational strength, such as
P (Ellis, 2006), or predictability (familiarity and frequency), or through the
phraseological approach (Nesselhauf, 2004; Paquot 2019), which differentiates
between different multiword unit types in terms of linguistic criteria, such as
their noncompositionality (idiomaticity) and their fixedness (e.g., tie the knot,
tie-dye) or use in free combinations representing no fixedness (e.g., tie some-
thing to something). Formulaic sequences can be extracted from a probabilistic
network of constructions based on their fixedness and/or frequency of occur-
rence in reference corpora (Colson, 2017) by using automated analyzers, such
as CollGram (Bestgen & Granger, 2014) or IdiomSearch (Colson, 2017).
Another way to detect longer sequences of conventionalized ways of say-
ing things in L2 learners’ output is by means of a more qualitative approach.
This approach starts with the meaning and then explores how different L2
learners express such a meaning (Gustafsson, 2019). In their study, Smiskova-
Gustafsson et al. (2012) used a three-step analysis based on a triangulation

7 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

of task-elicited L2 learner data (short texts responding to a prompt question),

reference corpus frequency, and native speaker judgment. For example, from
the following set of expressions for “becoming an adult,” the sequence when I
grow up was rated as the most natural:
(1) When I am a grown up adult I would like to be a neurosurgeon. I
would like to be a neurosurgeon when I am a grown up because I really
like biology and I think I am quite good at it.
(2) I seriously have no idea what kind of job I’d like to do. And I’m getting
sick and tired of people who ask me that. Just because of that I’m in
eighth grade, I’m probably supposed to know what I want to do when I
grow up. (Smiskova-Gustafsson et al., 2012, p. 125)
An advantage of the three-step approach is that conventionalized ways of
saying things such as when I grow up and idioms like pull someone’s leg are not
always detected by means of an automated analysis based on metric clustering
techniques (Colson, 2017, p. 1), but can be discovered with human raters and
their judgments of naturalness.
Previous studies have shown that the development of targetlike L2 formu-
laic sequences in L2 learners is facilitated by authentic input in the TL, as each
learner figures out L2 patterns through frequent and salient exposure (Ellis
et al., 2015). A cross-sectional study by Verspoor et al. (2012) traced L2 devel-
opment across five proficiency levels, analyzing 437 texts by Dutch secondary
school pupils for holistically rated proficiency. The authors found that the use
of formulaic sequences was a characteristic of more proficient L2 writers,
with increased use of fixed phrases (e.g., what a pity). Although they also
found some development in lexical diversity (measured by Guiraud’s index)
for lower levels, they reported that what changes from the lowest to the highest
proficiency level is not “the relative frequency or sophistication of separate
lexical items … but the different combination of words” (p. 252). In other
words, texts that received higher proficiency scores from human raters dis-
played more fluent, accurate, and targetlike language use (Macqueen & Knoch,
2020; Verspoor et al., 2012). Smiskova-Gustafsson (2013) and Gustafsson and
Verspoor (2017) investigated the use of targetlike chunks in prompt-elicited
short texts by Dutch learners of English in two input conditions: a high-input
bilingual program and a low-input regular instruction program. The results
showed that higher amounts of meaningful L2 input resulted in more gains in
the use of chunks as compared to low-input conditions.
By and large, these studies confirm that the use of formulaic sequences
develops with proficiency, use, and experience in the TL (Gustafsson &

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 8

Verspoor, 2017; Macqueen & Knoch, 2020; Verspoor et al., 2012). However,
the use of formulaic sequences has been studied longitudinally in the early
stages of L2 development (Gustafsson & Verspoor, 2017), but not much at
advanced stages, the focus of the present study. We expected that the SA
context, which typically provides high amounts of repeated, contextualized,
and meaningful L2 input, would have a positive effect on the sojourners’
development of formulaic sequences (Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008, p. 447),
which can be captured by automated tools.

Lexical Complexity
Previous SA studies have shown significant gains for lexical complexity, that
is, diversity, sophistication, and density (see the reviews by Borràs & Llanes,
2021, and Llanes, 2011). L2 lexical complexity (Bulté & Housen, 2012) is a
complex dynamic phenomenon consisting of several subdimensions, and these
should be taken into consideration in a multidimensional analysis framework.
Despite numerous available indices, the majority of L2 research has em-
ployed a few measures to determine lexical diversity/variation, sophistication,
and density (McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010). Traditionally, researchers of L2
acquisition employed generic indices to capture diversity and variation (e.g.,
type/token ratio [TTR], root-TTR or Guiraud’s index, VocD), sophistication
(e.g., average word length, the number of words from the Academic Word List
[Coxhead, 2000]), percentage of words from different word frequency bands),
and density (content word ratio). Given that the TTR could be problematic
depending on text length (Zenker & Kyle, 2021), our study addresses this
problem by employing an index confirmed to be robust against text-length
effects (Zenker & Kyle, 2021), namely the measure of textual lexical density
(MTLD;1 McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010). Along with diversity and density, lex-
ical sophistication is frequently measured as an index to capture the depth
of learners’ word knowledge, measured mostly through special word lists
constructed as a result of corpus-driven frequency counts (e.g., the AWL or
the General Service List; Kyle & Crossley, 2015). Most lexical complexity
measures operate on frequency counts. However, it is suggested to include a
measure tackling the dispersion of how well a word or word family is used
(Kyle & Crossley, 2015) within a multidimensional framework. The data set
analyzed in this study (further explained in the Method section) necessitates
employing measures that cover lexical sophistication in both academic and
nonacademic contexts (the latter involving daily language use and informal
genres). Thus, we employ measures that capture all these dimensions of L2
lexical complexity within a multidimensional analytical framework.

9 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

A number of studies within the CDST or DUB approach have explored lex-
ical development longitudinally by analyzing dense learner performance data
elicited through written or oral tasks (see Fogal, 2022, for an overview). One
of the main findings is that different variables (TTR, sophistication, academic
words) develop at different stages of development (beginner, intermediate, ad-
vanced). For example, Verspoor et al. (2017) traced three advanced Dutch L1
learners of English for over 4 years. Even though each learner had an individ-
ual trajectory, there were commonalities: None showed significant changes for
lexical diversity, but they all made significant gains in the number of academic
words, average word length, and unique content words. The authors concluded
that some of the lexical indices “that discriminate well between L2 English
texts written by L1 Dutch students at lower levels of proficiency do not do so
at the higher level of students with the same L1 background, and vice versa”
(p. 18). Thus, we might expect different developmental trajectories for dif-
ferent dimensions of L2 performance across different stages of development.
These findings were supported by Penris and Verspoor (2017), who traced the
writing development of a L1 Dutch learner of English in two different educa-
tional contexts. For the first 5 years, he was at a teacher training college (31
texts) and developed within a high-intermediate to low-advanced range; then,
after an 8-year gap as an English teacher, he continued a 3-year postgraduate
program in applied linguistics (18 texts) and developed from a low-advanced to
an advanced-academic range. Between the first and second stages, there were
significant differences in average content word length, percentage of academic
words (AWL), percentage of less frequent lexical items, percentage of unique
lexical items, and TTR, but there was no difference in lexical density (LD).
Overall, most studies looking into lexical complexity development at
advanced levels have reported increases for sophistication (AWL or average
word length), but almost no changes have been found for lexical diversity and
density.

The Current Study

The current study traces L2 development from a DUB perspective in 26 ad-
vanced sojourners’ written performances as they studied abroad in an Anglo-
phone country for one semester.
The following research questions guided the study:
1. To what extent does the sojourners’ use of holistic formulaicity develop?
2. To what extent does the sojourners’ use of formulaic sequences develop?
3. To what extent does sojourners’ use of lexical complexity in terms of
diversity, density, and sophistication develop?

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 10

Method
This study traces the written texts of 26 Catalan/Spanish bilingual tertiary-
level sojourners in an Anglophone country over one semester (12 to 17 weeks)
in three measures. We utilized both human judgment and automated tools to
measure holistic formulaicity, formulaic sequences, and lexical complexity
(diversity, density, sophistication).

Participants
The participants in this study were involved in the Study Abroad and Language
Acquisition (SALA) project (Pérez-Vidal, 2014). All SALA participants, in-
cluding the 26 participants in this subgroup, were bilingual speakers of Catalan
and Spanish as their L1, majoring in a language specialization degree at a
Catalan university in Barcelona, with English as their major language of study.
The median age for all SALA participants was 19 at the onset of the study,
within an age range of 17–27 years.

Predeparture Proficiency
The students participating in the study were obliged to take an institutional pro-
ficiency test to meet the home university entry requirements (before starting
their studies at the home university). This test involves a reading comprehen-
sion task and a written essay of about 200 words in response to an audiovisual
prompt. The receptive and productive tasks are relevant and/or complementary
to each other in terms of topic. The test finishes with a translation compo-
nent (from Spanish or Catalan to English). These tests are holistically assessed
by specially trained in-house instructors. Prior to departing for their semester
abroad at the beginning of their 2nd year, all SALA participants were certi-
fied to be at an upper-intermediate to advanced level—equivalent to higher-B2
to C1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)—of
initial proficiency in English, as a major requirement for their degrees and
the host universities involved in their Erasmus mobility scheme. The univer-
sity has mutual agreements with universities around the globe, which require
different minimum language competencies to be met at predeparture, as the
minimum proficiency to embark on an exchange at an Anglophone university
varies between the higher-B2 and C1 levels of the CEFR. See Appendix S1 in
the Supporting Information online for the predeparture proficiency scores of
the 26 participants in the current study.

The SALA Diary Corpus

This study analyzed 26 Catalan/Spanish sojourners’ weekly diary entries as
written performance data collected as part of the SALA project (Pérez-Vidal,

11 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

2014). In total, 383 weekly diary entries were collected (12 to 17 entries per
participant, with a total of 274,041 words; Köylü et al., 2023); see Appendix
S1 in the Supporting Information online for overview data on participants’
diary entries in the corpus. The diaries were written using a word processor
and submitted all together upon return home.
The participants’ assignment was to write a piece every week, with no
preset word limit, reflecting on their overall sojourn experiences in terms of
noteworthy linguistic, cultural, and social interactions, observations, and their
perceived language development during SA. With this prompt in mind, the
participants used an overall academic register; however, the prompt-based
task meant that they described common daily observations and occurrences
rather than research-oriented topics, and therefore the number of academic
words used was not expected to increase. Thus, even though the entries are
not quintessential free-style diary pieces, the typical storytelling component
of diaries through personal anecdotes was evident in each entry. The following
three excerpts show the type of written production in the diaries (all errors are
original):
1. This was a special week because the enrolment took place in it. The reg-
istration session was arranged for all incoming Erasmus students, which
meant that I would have the opportunity to meet students like me from
all over the European Union (P13W02).
2. Today I’ve been told about “the Beefeaters”. It is the name of the guards
standing on the Tower of London who, by order of the queen, have to feed
all black birds of England so as to not let them disappear because it is of
public knowledge the day there are no black birds left the monarchy will
end. Pitifully, I saw no Beefeaters while being in England (P07W03).
3. Of course, the bartender took the glass right away, apologized, filled in
the desired amount of Sprite, and apologized again for the embarrassing
incidence. At that point a real duel of ‘sorries’ broke out. The customer
was so sorry for not being pleased with her drink at the first place and
the girl behind the bar was so sorry for her unforgivable mistake. Without
exaggerating, I could count more than 30 ‘sorries’ during the two minutes
‘combat,’ and I was quite amused by excessive changing of apologies
(P10W04). (Köylü et al., 2023, p. 5)

Holistic Formulaicity Scores

Human raters are known to assign higher holistic proficiency scores to learner
performances with frequent use of formulaic expressions (Macqueen &

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 12

Knoch, 2020). For example, Bestgen and Granger (2014) used CollGram to
analyze the phraseological strength of bigrams (two-word relationships) in a
corpus of 171 essays from a group of tertiary English learners, showing that
bigrams of less frequent words (e.g., Korean peninsula) positively correlated
with holistic essay scores assigned by expert raters, whereas those of high
frequency (e.g., of the) did not show a significant correlation. The authors
suggested that human raters probably recognize these less frequent bigrams
as indicators of a higher competence in the TL. Also, the negative correla-
tion between erroneous combinations (e.g., everyone are) and essay scores
indicated that human raters probably attend to grammatical accuracy in their
judgments. As human raters have intuitions about nativelike language use
(Macqueen & Knoch, 2020), and as holistic formulaicity may be difficult to
quantify, we asked experienced English teachers to rate the data set on holistic
formulaicity and assign holistic proficiency (HOLFOR) scores. The four raters
were tertiary-level instructors in English as a foreign language or English for
academic purposes (near-native speakers of English with more than 20 years
of tertiary-level teaching experience), along with the first author, who has
similar experience in teaching English for academic purposes.
In a similar procedure to the holistic proficiency assessment instructions
set out by Verspoor et al. (2017, pp. 4–5), the raters were first trained by com-
paring a small number of texts in accordance with the holistic formulaicity
definition to establish a ranking from 1 to 5 (1 = least formulaic to 5 = most
formulaic) that everyone could agree upon (see below for the instructions).
This small set of rated texts were then used as benchmarks for rating the
remainder of the texts.
Once the benchmarks were established, the texts from all students were
provided in randomized order. Overall, each instructor rated around 90 texts,
but the first author rated all 383. Each text was assigned a score by three in-
dependent raters. The interrater reliability for holistic formulaicity was high,
with a Cronbach’s alpha of .81.

Instructions for Raters

The instructions given to the raters, modified from those used by Verspoor et al.
(2017, pp. 4–5), were as follows:
The following texts were written by the same people, majors of
Translation and Interpretation in English and Catalan/Spanish over the
course of an academic semester abroad. To see if their written English
has matured in terms of general formulaic competence, please evaluate
their styles at the linguistic level (constructions, word choice, the way

13 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

they are combined, formulaicity and use of such expressions,

native-likeliness and how conventionalized and natural they sound) and
rate them holistically. What matters is the all-round impression the text
gives (you do not need look at specific language features separately but
go for the all-round impression the text gives in terms of native likeness),
so please assign it a score of 1 to 5:

1 = out of all these samples this one is at the lower end of

formulaic competence (style is rather awkward).
2 = somewhat better than 1, but less awkward
3 = somewhat better than 2
4 = slightly weaker than 5, but quite native-like in style
5 = out of all these samples at the higher end of formulaicity
(style is quite naturally sounding, conventionalized, and native-
like)

Formulaic Sequence Indices

The use of formulaic sequences was determined via IdiomSearch (Colson,
2017) through the automated inspection of multiword constructions. Idiom-
Search operates on phraseological units (formulaic language) extracted from
extensive web corpora in Chinese, English, French, and Spanish of approxi-
mately 200 million tokens for each language. IdiomSearch searches these units
when a text is inputted. Drawing on a constructionist framework, IdiomSearch
also considers association strength in and between collocations (Colson, 2017,
p. 3), calculating a corpus proximity ratio (cpr-score), which is the average
distance between “the component grams of an n-gram, given a window set be-
tween 20 to 50 tokens according to the language” (Colson, 2017, p. 4). The
cpr-score thus produces a stable and reliable score regardless of the length of
the n-gram (see Colson, 2017, p. 4, for a full description and discussion of this
score). IdiomSearch2 operates on a database through which all “n-grams rang-
ing from bigrams to 7-grams with a frequency threshold of 3 occurrences for
200 million tokens” (Colson, 2017, p. 5) are extracted.
When a text is inputted into IdiomSearch, the results are presented with
coding in different colors, as in Figure 1, which shows a sample output for the
third diary excerpt presented earlier. The different colors represent the degree
of fixedness, such as pale yellow for partly fixed and frequent phraseological
units, and deep red for very fixed and not frequent ones. The shades of the
colors also indicate the frequency of the items (e.g., dark red for very fixed
and not frequent). The results present two different types of coverage rates:

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 14

Figure 1 Sample IdiomSearch results output. PW ratio = per-word ratio; PT ra-

tio = per-text ratio.

Table 1 Formulaic sequence indices

Dimension Abbreviation Full name Description Software

Automated PW Per word Number of IdiomSearch

measure of ratio multiword
formulaicity formulaic
(multiword constructions
construction use) (set phrases) per
total number of
words
PT Per text ratio Total number of IdiomSearch
words in the text
included in the
formulaic
constructions

one per word (PW ratio), which considers the number of phraseological units
per total number of words, and another per text (PT ratio), which considers the
total number of words in the text included in the phraseological units. In other
words, a PT ratio of 0.31 as in the Figure 1 example means that 31% of all the
word tokens in the text are included in the phraseological units, whereas 69%
of them occur outside those units. Table 1 presents the formulaicity indices
employed in the analyses.

Lexical Complexity Indices

All diary entries were first transformed into plain text. These files were an-
alyzed for lexical complexity using a variety of measures via different tools,
such as Vocabprofile (Cobb, 2000), the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of

15 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015), and the Tool for the
Automatic Analysis of Lexical Diversity (TAALED; Kyle, Crossley, & Jarvis,
2021), to capture lexical density, sophistication, and diversity. Table 2 describes
the indices used in the analyses.

Data Analyses
We aimed to identify a shared L2 development tendency in the whole data set
given, considering the total time spent abroad. We analyzed the data set with
individual trajectories through a series of generalized additive mixed models
(GAMMs) in order to understand the interconnection between formulaicity,
formulaic sequences, and lexical complexity measures and time, utilizing the
mgcv package (Wood, 2006) in R (R Core Team, 2022) to trace their develop-
ment. GAMMs allow for a nonlinear function of time when analyzing nested
dependencies in dense data, for instance, time intervals within learning trajec-
tories (Kliesch & Pfenninger, 2021, p. 248). GAMMs are preferred on account
of potential intercorrelations within clusters in our data set and also in an at-
tempt to provide a more accurate representation of the data structure. Unlike
traditional linear models, which commonly assume both linearity and normal-
ity of residuals, GAMMs offer increased flexibility by accommodating nonlin-
ear relationships in the data. Nonetheless, unless otherwise specified, GAMMs
generally maintain the assumption of normally distributed residuals, which is
a consideration still upheld in our modeling approach. We plotted the results
from the GAMM analyses using the itsadug package (van Rij et al., 2020).
Examining individual raw data can pose challenges in discerning any over-
all improvement or change. As with conventional statistical methods, smooth-
ing techniques are crucial in GAMMs for revealing underlying trends by fitting
smooth, flexible forms to the data. In GAMMs, these smooths help in model-
ing complex nonlinear relationships without making parametric assumptions
about the form of these relationships, enhancing the model’s ability to describe
the data accurately. Consequently, smoothers are highly effective in conveying
the direction of change and offering an overview of the general developmen-
tal pattern. The effective degrees of freedom (EDF) in the results indicate the
complexity of the smooth term, reflecting the nonlinearity of the trajectory. In
contrast, the F value and p value from the output of the mgcv package (Wood,
2006) assess the overall statistical significance of the variable, independent
of whether the relationship with the outcome variable is linear or nonlinear.
An EDF value larger than 1.000 shows a nonlinear trajectory, while 1.000 in-
dicates a linear trend. The dependent variables were the linguistic variables
(e.g., scores on different measures), while time (data collection points) was

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 16

17
Table 2 Lexical complexity indices
Köylü et al.

Dimension Abbreviation Full name Description Software

Density LD Lexical density Number of content words per total number of Vocabprofile
words
Sophistication AWL Academic Word Number of words from list of 570 words Vocabprofile
List frequently used in an academic context
(Coxhead, 2000)
BNC_Written_ BNC written word Average frequency counts from written word TAALES
Freq_AWa frequency frequencies derived from the British National
average Corpus (BNC)
BNC_Spoken_ BNC spoken word Average frequency counts from spoken word TAALES
Freq_AWa frequency frequencies derived from the British National
average Corpus (BNC)
COCA_Spoken_ COCA spoken Average frequency counts from spoken word TAALES
Freq_AW word frequency frequencies derived from the Corpus of
average Contemporary American English (COCA)
Diversity MTLDb Measure of textual Average number of tokens in a text required to TAALED
lexical diversity reach a given type/token value
Note. TAALES = Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication; TAALED = Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical
a b
Diversity. See Kyle and Crossley (2015) for a full description of BNC word frequency average scores. See McCarthy and Jarvis (2010)
for a full description of MTLD.

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Sojourners’ L2 Formulaicity & Lexical Development

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Köylü et al. Sojourners’ L2 Formulaicity & Lexical Development

used to determine the fixed effect and participant as the effect with random
intercepts allowing a nonlinear function of time. The following model specifi-
cation is used in the GAMM analyses via the mgcv package (Wood, 2006; for
the complete GAMMs syntax, see Appendix S6 in the Supporting Information
online):

holfor <- bam(HOLFOR ∼ s(Week, k = 10) + s(Week,PAR,k = 10,

bs = “fs”,m = 1), data = mydata, discrete = T, nthreads = 2)
summary(holfor)
plot_smooth(holfor, view = “Week”, plot_all = “Holfor”, rug = FALSE,
col = ‘blue’)
plot(holfor, select = 1)

In the context of GAMMs, it is assumed that random effects, corresponding

to individual participants, contribute unique developmental trajectories due to
diverse initial points (e.g., threshold proficiencies in English before departure).
Simultaneously, GAMMs have the capability to discern a general tendency for
the written performance variables across participants.

Results
Here we present the results relating to each of the three research questions in
turn.

Holistic Formulaicity Development

We first inspected the data set to investigate the extent to which the partici-
pants developed their nativelike language use holistically (HOLFOR) after a
semester abroad as assessed by human raters. The GAMM model indicated
a significant positive relationship between time and HOLFOR, confirming a
linear developmental trajectory (EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .016,
F = 5.781), which indicates that all participants developed this construct over a
semester abroad. Figure 2 shows the plots of HOLFOR scores per each partic-
ipant’s weekly performance (at each data collection time) with the regression
line produced by the GAMM model, while Figure 3 presents individual trajec-
tories. Table 3 presents a summary of the model.
As the scatter plot for the group tendency shows, there is a linear growing
group trend for holistic formulaicity. The group significantly improved their
formulaic production after spending a semester abroad. As holistic formulaic-
ity conceptualizes an overall impression of formulaic language use, this signif-
icant result confirms that participants made a better impression on the human
raters over time.

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 18

Figure 2 Holistic formulaicity (HOLFOR) scatter plot per participants. PAR =

participant.
Table 3 Generalized additive mixed model predicting holistic formulaicity (HOLFOR)
scores

Parametric
Coefficients Estimate Std. Error t Pr(>|t|) Edf Ref.df F p

(Intercept) 3.80 0.037 102.9 <.001

Smooth terms
s(Week) 1.000 1.000 5.781 .016
s(Week, PAR) 1.000 1.000 0.120 .072
Note. Edf = effective degrees of freedom; Ref.df = reference degrees of freedom.

To illustrate what a significant change in holistic formulaicity might look

like, the following excerpts from Participant 5 from the first and the last week
of her stay are provided:

19 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Figure 3 Holistic formulaicity (HOLFOR) scores for each sojourner each week.

Week 1
[…] in the United Kingdom the sport is a very important part in the life
of the student. I personally think that is a very healthy way of conceive
the university life. […] And coming back to what I was saying first, the
sport will let me know some specific vocabulary related to the positions,
the movements and the tactics inside the field. Concerning to the Scottish
accent, and even the English accent, I have some difficulties to
understand some questions sometimes. Maybe this is due to the fact that I
am more used to the American accent. I was told that the English from
the United Kingdom was more understandable and clear, but I can assure
that this is not true. It all depends on what are you used to. (P05W01)

Week 12
The most important thing is to be yourself, to be happy with what you
have and make the most of it, and always treat the others as you would
like to be treated. I came here determined to give “me” a chance, and I
started from scratch. I have met wonderful people here, all of them very
different, from different countries, and all very interesting in their own

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 20

way. In my last day here I received presents from all of them, some
unexpected, and that made me feel loved, lucky for having friends like
them. I am not saying that I don’t have good friends here, because I do,
but I know them since I was little. The merit now is bigger. I feel that
people can really like me for what I am now. (P05W12)

The weekly entry from which the first excerpt was taken received a HOLFOR
score of 3.00 on a scale of 5.00, whereas the one from Week 12 received 4.25.
As Figure 3 shows, most sojourners were variable in their HOLFOR scores
over time, with most showing an upward trend (e.g., Participant 10) and some
a downward trend (e.g., Participant 3). More importantly, the trajectories are
rather linear for most, with the exception of Participants 2, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21,
and 23. What is striking is that those following a nonlinear route also improve
their holistic formulaicity at the end of their sojourn.

Development in the Use of Formulaic Sequences

We analyzed the use of formulaic sequences, as determined by Idiom-
Search, using two separate GAMMs. The first model, which predicts
formulaic sequence use over time, indicated a nonsignificant nonlinear
effect (EDF = 1.548, Ref.df = 1.902, p = .19, F = 1.381). The second
model included the PT ratio and showed a nonsignificant nonlinear effect
(EDF = 2.421, Ref.df = 2.922, p = .10, F = 2.437; the model summaries
and scatter plots are available in Appendix S3 in the Supporting Information
online).

Lexical Complexity Development

To answer our third research question, we investigated the relationship be-
tween time and lexical complexity development in the form of lexical density,
diversity, and sophistication. We used five indices to explore and model the
longitudinal growth of written lexical complexity. The results of the GAMM
using time to predict the MTLD did not indicate a significant main effect
(EDF = 1.780, Ref.df = 2.199, p = .29, F = 1.248) or interaction effect
(EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .51, F = 0.420) between time and lex-
ical diversity (MTLD; see Appendix S3 in the Supporting Information online
for the summary tables and scatter plots).
No significant main or interaction effects were found between time and
other lexical complexity measures, such as the following:
r lexical density (main: EDF = 1.310, Ref.df = 1.554, p = .76, F = 0.370;
interaction: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .46, F = 0.554)

21 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

r AWL (main: EDF = 1.934, Ref.df = 2.382, p = .20, F = 1.350; interac-

tion: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .22, F = 1.519)
r BNC_Written_Freq_AW (main: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .931,
F = 0.008; interaction: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .272,
F = 1.209)
r BNC_Spoken_Freq_AW (main: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .931,
F = 0.008; interaction: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000, p = .272,
F = 1.209)
r COCA_Spoken_Freq_AW (main: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000,
p = .185, F = 2.049) (interaction: EDF = 1.000, Ref.df = 1.000,
p = .924, F = 0.009)
All model summary tables and scatter plots are available in Appendix S3
in the Supporting Information online. (Also see Appendix S4 for a summary
of further nonsignificant models for additional BNC and COCA n-gram fre-
quencies provided by TAALED and Appendix S5 for graphs showing GAMM
group tendencies.)
In summary, the results of the GAMM analysis indicated significant im-
provement only for holistic formulaicity, following a linear trend for the par-
ticipants as a group. Inspection showed that most participants also individu-
ally followed a linear trajectory, except for a small group of participants, who
demonstrated nonlinear trends, but still ended up developing their holistic for-
mulaicity (Participants 8, 11, 14, 21). There was no significant change for any
other dimension of L2 performance in the analyses.
Discussion
We traced weekly diary entries of 26 Catalan/Spanish sojourners during their
semester abroad to explore how their L2 English developed in terms of holis-
tic formulaicity, the use of formulaic sequences, and lexical complexity, and
thereby identify trends, if any.
The analysis for the first research question showed that our sojourner-
participants significantly developed their holistic formulaicity scores. Contrary
to the general belief that there is not much left to develop after a L2 learner
has reached a relatively high level of competence (Flynn & O’Neil, 1988;
Han, 2004; Osborne, 2007), our results confirmed that studying abroad in a
TL context allows for significant gains in holistic formulaicity at advanced
levels of proficiency. It is clear that our participants came to sound more
authentic and nativelike over time. The SA context is a significant source
of authentic input and interaction in the L2 (Pérez-Vidal & Llanes, 2021),
helping the participants to gain in holistic formulaicity even at such high levels

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 22

of English proficiency. It may be argued that holistic formulaicity develops

abroad because learners avail themselves of the opportunities for interacting
in a myriad of settings and situations, and formulas may be used for their
pragmatic social value. They make sense and save processing time for quick
communication. The current findings extend the widely known advantage
of SA for learners at pre-intermediate and intermediate, to advanced level
(Collentine, 2009; DeKeyser, 2007; Köylü, 2023), who can still benefit from
a short-term sojourn. These results also align with those in the literature
regarding the positive influence of longer stays abroad in the TL environment,
leading to more nativelike lexical choices, more colloquialism, and nativelike
collocational use (Erman et al., 2018; Foster, 2009). Immersion situations,
including short-term stays abroad, would thus contribute to the use of L2
formulaicity and idiomaticity even for highly competent English learners
(Foster et al., 2014; Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008; Zaytseva et al., 2021). The
advantages of a sojourn might vary with level of L2 proficiency, as argued
by DeKeyser (2007), but overall remain constant for all if certain input and
interaction conditions are provided, and if learners make the most of them.
The analysis addressing our second research question did not show any
significant improvement in the use of formulaic sequences. This finding is not
in line with the study by Verspoor et al. (2012), who found that the use of
formulaic sequences develops with increased proficiency in beginner and in-
termediate learners, nor with work by Siyanova-Chanturia and Schmitt (2008),
who argue that a sojourn experience is best for formulaic sequence develop-
ment at higher proficiency levels (from B2 to C2 of the CEFR). There may
be several reasons for these mixed findings. There may be problems with the
automated formulaic sequence analysis used in this study, in that automated
tools for textual analysis are yet to perfectly model human judgment (Kyle,
personal communication). Whereas IdiomSearch captures two- to seven-word
n-grams with a high association strength, many formulaic expressions may
consist of longer word strings and may be less fixed (Smiskova-Gustafsson
et al., 2012). Given that some nativelike sequences, such as at that point or
unforgivable mistake, are not captured by this tool (see Figure 1), it seems that
some conventionalized expressions in our data do not reach the frequency and
association strength thresholds set by IdiomSearch. Also, our findings show
that IdiomSearch does not capture noncontiguous formulaic units, as in the
sequence apologized again for (see Figure 1), where again intervenes in the
formulaic combination apologized for; this leaves out yet another aspect of
formulaic sequences in our L2 learner data. Moreover, the corpora used by
IdiomSearch may not be suitable reference corpora for research on formulaic

23 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

sequences in our type of L2 English learner data, given that the register and
style of the sojourners’ diary writing approximates spoken, informal style,
rather than written and academic style. Taken together, these points may ex-
plain why the PW and PT measures determined by the IdiomSearch tool did
not show further development in our participants.
The main findings for the third research question are that the sojourners’
lexical scores did not develop significantly during the semester abroad in terms
of density, sophistication, or diversity. These findings could be explained in
different ways. As the sojourners learn more conventionalized ways of saying
things, they may use more colloquial, less sophisticated words, and use the
same words more frequently. For example, phrasal verbs, which are one of the
hallmarks of nativelike use of English, consist of high-frequency but rather
low-sophistication words (e.g., the sojourners might use the phrasal verb put
up with instead of a more sophisticated word like tolerate or endure). Such
expressions will contribute to the overall impression of high proficiency and
formulaicity, so the holistic proficiency scores will increase, even though lexi-
cal measures will remain the same or decrease. This finding is in line with the
current literature in terms of lexical diversity and density (Penris & Verspoor,
2017). However, our results have also not confirmed any development for
sophistication (e.g., academic words or the use of unique words), in contrast to
what the literature suggests (Penris & Verspoor, 2017; Verspoor et al., 2017).
This might be relevant to the idea that our participants as advanced learners
of English have already reached a plateau by stabilizing their interlanguage
(Flynn & O’Neil, 1988; Han, 2004; Osborne, 2007). Another explanation
might involve task effects. The nature of diary writing by reporting on daily
life experiences might have led our participants to repeatedly use words from
higher frequency bands throughout their stay.
Additionally, complex dynamic systems studies in the literature have con-
firmed different growth trajectories for different proficiency levels (e.g., from
pre-intermediate to intermediate). We believe that upper-intermediate to ad-
vanced proficiency has a different developmental trajectory from that seen for
lower levels, as our participants probably ended up with gains in different di-
mensions of their written formulaicity that we could not individually measure.
These results, thus, support the argument that different linguistic features will
become marked or develop at different proficiency levels (Penris & Verspoor,
2017; Verspoor et al., 2012). Our participants might have wanted to sound
more nativelike and authentic through frequent use of conventionalized con-
structions, mostly involving lexical items from higher frequencies (Siyanova-
Chanturia & Pellicer-Sánchez, 2018). Thus, there seems to be a logical link

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 24

between increased holistic formulaicity and a lack of significant change in lex-

ical diversity scores.
Finally, it might also be the case that using more conventionalized con-
structions in advanced writing might resemble L2 production from lower
proficiency levels with words and phrases from higher frequency bands in
shorter, less complex sentence structures. We conventionally expect signifi-
cant development in lexical dimensions at higher proficiencies (Michel et al.,
2022), such as increased academic word usage and lexical density, wide use
of lower frequency words or multiword constructions, or increased lexical
diversity scores, yet the increased use of conventionalized constructions might
be misleading us. Of course, in our study, the genre and task may have played
a role, too. When writing about their daily lives during study abroad, the topics
our participants touched upon could be expressed with mostly high-frequency
words and less complex structures, yet in quite nativelike and formulaic
language. The more our participants documented their daily lives and how
they encountered the English language and culture during their sojourn, the
more formulaic and nativelike their pieces became.

Conclusion
Taking a DUB perspective, this study investigated the nexus between time and
development in holistic formulaicity, formulaic sequences, and lexical com-
plexity in a group of Catalan/Spanish tertiary-level sojourners who had upper-
intermediate to advanced proficiency in English. We aimed to determine a
nonlinear trend for L2 development after a semester abroad through a series
of GAMMs, while expecting large amounts of individual variation as we ex-
plored the predictive power of time and its nonlinear function.
Our analyses confirmed a significant linear main effect of time only on
holistic formulaicity (which subsumes lexical sequences, verb–argument con-
structions, intensifiers, fillers, pragmatic markers, discourse markers, and for-
mulaic sequences), while nonlinear individual trajectories were also present
in the data set. There was no significant development in the use of formu-
laic sequences; this may have been due to ceiling effects in the sojourners’
interlanguage, but we also suspect that the automated measures used may fail
to detect to what degree syntactic or lexical constructions can be regarded as
conventionalized sequences in the TL, most likely because the frequency of
occurrence of set sequences is not the only indicator of formulaicity. We can
conclude by saying that, after a semester abroad, our upper-intermediate to
advanced sojourners increased their use of holistic formulaicity according to
human raters; however, they did not show development either within the typi-

25 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

caldimensions (e.g., lexical diversity)or to the extent that the automated tools
employed for the analyses would capture it, nor with respect to the more con-
ventional lexical dimensions.
This study significantly contributes to our understanding of L2 develop-
ment during SA sojourns for those of high predeparture proficiency levels. Our
results support the idea that learners of different proficiencies may display var-
ied changes in competencies and capabilities (Penris & Verspoor, 2017), while
the nature of trade-offs between holistic formulaicity, formulaic sequences, and
lexical complexity may alter as sojourners start from an already competent
threshold level. Yet, it should be kept in mind that we did not directly compare
any developmental patterns across different levels of proficiency. The findings
of Verspoor et al. (2012) can now be extended thanks to our findings from
lower proficiency levels to upper-intermediate and/or advanced levels for the
additional dimensions of L2 performance, holistic formulaicity as rated by hu-
mans, and formulaic sequences as assessed by automated analyzers, along with
lexical density, sophistication, and diversity. Sounding more authentic and na-
tivelike is probably the key objective of sojourners at such high proficiencies.
They might be trying to imitate L1 users more than lower proficiency learners
(Pérez-Vidal & Barquin, 2014).
This study is not without limitations. Firstly, we analyzed a data set
composed of weekly diary entries. We did not assign our participants a fixed,
repeated task even though they were given clear instructions and prompts
to complete the weekly written task, but at different lengths ranging from
400 words to 2,000 words. However, there was a thematic similarity across
different entries. We also employed statistical methods that are robust against
imbalanced data sets, accommodating disparities such as differing total
numbers of entries per participant. Additionally, we calculated indices that
take account of variation in word counts per entry, ensuring that our analyses
remained sensitive to these differences without assuming uniform distribution
of the outcome variable across different weeks or participants.
In sum, we have sought to contribute to the field with one of the
first examples of DUB L2 development research investigating the case of
advanced-level sojourners spending their SA exchange in a TL country.
Therefore, we strongly advocate more studies with lower proficiency levels
to explore how a DUB perspective can contribute to our understanding of
L2 development during SA. To our knowledge, this is also the first study
involving holistic formulaicity assessment through human judgment and
formulaic sequence assessment with automated analyzers to explore sojourner
diaries for L2 development. Our findings suggest that holistic formulaicity

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 26

is achieved with a complex interplay of linguistic features, and formulaic

sequences are only part of the construct, which indicates new avenues for
research in L2 acquisition. In general, we suggest conducting longitudinal
studies with sojourners of different predeparture proficiencies to understand
their development in holistic formulaicity, formulaic sequences, and lexical
complexity through dense data in an environment abundant in TL input and
interaction.

Final revised version accepted 8 July 2024

Notes
1 The MTLD is calculated as “the mean length of word strings that maintain a
criterion level of lexical variation” (McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010, p. 381).
2 The tool was freely accessible from a web application
(https://idiomsearch.lsti.ucl.ac.be/) until mid-September 2024. Please contact
Jean-Pierre Colson (https://uclouvain.be/fr/repertoires/jean-pierre.colson) for use.

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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be found in the online version of this
article at the publisher’s website:

Accessible Summary
Appendix S1. Overview of Participant Diaries and Proficiency Profiles.
Appendix S2. Information on the Training of the Human Raters.
Appendix S3. Results of Generalized Additive Mixed Models for Nonsignifi-
cant Models.
Appendix S4. Additional Variables From the Tool for the Automatic Analysis
of Lexical Diversity (TAALED).
Appendix S5. Group Tendencies in the Generalized Additive Mixed Models.
Appendix S6. Syntax of the Generalized Additive Mixed Models.

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 32

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Language Learning - 2024 - Köylü - Longitudinal Development of Holistic Formulaicity Formulaic Sequences and Lexical

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Language Learning - 2024 - Köylü - Longitudinal Development of Holistic Formulaicity Formulaic Sequences and Lexical

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Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333

Longitudinal Development of Holistic

Abstract: Because of authentic exposure, study-abroad sojourners are expected to be-

CRediT author statement – Zeynep Köylü: conceptualization; methodology; investigation; formal

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 1

in written diary texts of 26 Catalan/Spanish bilingual sojourners in an Anglophone

Keywords study abroad; formulaicity; lexical complexity; dynamic usage-based per-

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 2

So far DUB studies have examined different dimensions of L2 performance—

3 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 4

The Dynamics of L2 Development in a Usage-Based Account

5 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Köylü et al. (2023) investigated how syntactic complexity developed over a

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 6

most importantly, this notion of formulaicity includes knowledge of when and

7 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

of task-elicited L2 learner data (short texts responding to a prompt question),

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 8

9 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

The Current Study

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 10

The SALA Diary Corpus

11 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Holistic Formulaicity Scores

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 12

Instructions for Raters

13 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

they are combined, formulaicity and use of such expressions,

1 = out of all these samples this one is at the lower end of

Formulaic Sequence Indices

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 14

Figure 1 Sample IdiomSearch results output. PW ratio = per-word ratio; PT ra-

Table 1 Formulaic sequence indices

Dimension Abbreviation Full name Description Software

Automated PW Per word Number of IdiomSearch

Lexical Complexity Indices

15 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 16

Dimension Abbreviation Full name Description Software

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

holfor <- bam(HOLFOR ∼ s(Week, k = 10) + s(Week,PAR,k = 10,

In the context of GAMMs, it is assumed that random effects, corresponding

Holistic Formulaicity Development

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 18

Figure 2 Holistic formulaicity (HOLFOR) scatter plot per participants. PAR =

(Intercept) 3.80 0.037 102.9 <.001

To illustrate what a significant change in holistic formulaicity might look

19 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 20

Development in the Use of Formulaic Sequences

Lexical Complexity Development

21 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

r AWL (main: EDF = 1.934, Ref.df = 2.382, p = .20, F = 1.350; interac-

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 22

of English proficiency. It may be argued that holistic formulaicity develops

23 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 24

between increased holistic formulaicity and a lack of significant change in lex-

25 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 26

is achieved with a complex interplay of linguistic features, and formulaic

Final revised version accepted 8 July 2024

27 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

corpus-based phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2017 proceedings; pp. 16–28). Springer.

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 28

29 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 30

Pérez-Vidal, C., & Llanes, À. (2021). Linguistic effects of international student

31 Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32

Lowie (Eds.), A dynamic approach to second language development (pp. 25–38).

Language Learning 00:0, xxxx 2024, pp. 1–32 32

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