<p>With the advent of corpora documenting learner English, a new and interesting field of research has become available. Learner corpora provide a new type of data which can inform thinking both in second language acquisition research and in foreign language teaching research. Analyses of learner corpora normally report on features which are typically ‘overused’ and ‘underused’, when contrasted to comparable native speaker corpora, in addition to those which are ‘misused’ by the learners. Ringbom (1998) conducted a study in which he identified one common aspect of non-native speaker corpora: the high frequency of general nouns, such as people and thing.</p><p>The aim of this paper was to test Ringbom’s findings and attempt to identify how English as a second language learners’ usage of these particular nouns in written production differ from that of native speakers by conducting a corpus comparison of comparable learner and native speaker corpora. The results of this study clearly support Ringbom’s findings; additionally, it was found that the learners’ written production does not appear vaguer and ‘non-native like’ merely because they overuse the general nouns people and thing, but it also seems as if the learners use these nouns in a more restricted range of meanings whereas the natives’ usage is more diversified. Moreover, this study has identified some of the issues that teachers of English as a second language should be aware of when helping their students to avoid using the general nouns people and thing in a non-native like manner.</p>

With the advent of corpora documenting learner English, a new and interesting field of research has become available. Learner corpora provide a new type of data which can inform thinking both in second language acquisition research and in foreign language teaching research. Analyses of learner corpora normally report on features which are typically ‘overused’ and ‘underused’, when contrasted to comparable native speaker corpora, in addition to those which are ‘misused’ by the learners. Ringbom (1998) conducted a study in which he identified one common aspect of non-native speaker corpora: the high frequency of general nouns, such as people and thing. The aim of this paper was to test Ringbom’s findings and attempt to identify how English as a second language learners’ usage of these particular nouns in written production differ from that of native speakers by conducting a corpus comparison of comparable learner and native speaker corpora. The results of this study clearly support Ringbom’s findings; additionally, it was found that the learners’ written production does not appear vaguer and ‘non-native like’ merely because they overuse the general nouns people and thing, but it also seems as if the learners use these nouns in a more restricted range of meanings whereas the natives’ usage is more diversified. Moreover, this study has identified some of the issues that teachers of English as a second language should be aware of when helping their students to avoid using the general nouns people and thing in a non-native like manner.

This study examines the use of discourse-organising nouns (DONs), such as fact, issue, and problem, in Swedish advanced students’ academic writing in second language (L2) English, and in what ways texts produced by the L2 students resemble or differ from those produced by advanced native-speaker (L1) students and from expert writing in this respect. The study uses corpus linguistic methodology and is set within the frameworks of Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics and Granger’s Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis. Results show both similarities and differences across the writer groups. Noteworthy similarities include overall frequencies of DONs and their modifiers. Differences include variety of usage and register appropriacy. These differences were often the largest between the L2 student writing and the expert writing, though findings suggest that both student groups can usefully be thought of as learners of academic writing in English in this respect. Specifically, the students’ usage was found to be less varied than the expert writing, and to be characterised by more frequent use of semantically vague nouns (e.g., thing and fact) and nouns marking attitude and involvement (e.g., opinion and question). Other central findings include the tendency, on the part of the students, to use DONs less frequently in syntactic structures prototypical of formal academic prose, and to use them more frequently in structures with the potential to express stance, compared to the expert writing. The study also found more frequent use of evaluative modifiers of DONs in the student writing. In sum, the L2 student writing and, to a lesser extent, the L1 student writing, was found to approximate the corpus of expert writing in many respects, but with less variety, fewer markers of formality, and more frequent occurrences of interpersonal features in their use of DONs. The result is discourse that can in part be characterised as vague and subjective, as well as involved and informal. / This study examines the use of discourse-organising nouns (DONs), such as fact, issue, and problem, in Swedish advanced students’ academic writing in second language (L2) English, and in what ways texts produced by the L2 students resemble or differ from those produced by advanced native-speaker students and from expert writing in this respect. Results show both similarities and differences across the writer groups. Noteworthy similarities include overall frequencies of DONs and their modifiers. Differences include variety of usage and register appropriacy. In short, the L2 student writing and, to a lesser extent, the L1 student writing, was found to approximate the corpus of expert writing in many respects, but with less variety, fewer markers of formality, and more frequent occurrences of interpersonal features in their use of DONs. The result is discourse that can in part be characterised as vague and subjective, as well as involved and informal. These differences were often the largest between the L2 student writing and the expert writing, though findings suggest that both student groups can usefully be thought of as learners of academic writing in English in this respect.