Phraseology in second and foreign language learning: towards an integrated view of research findings and related empirical evidence

A large amount of words that we utter tend to co-occur and gain meaning through the particular syntagmatic context they find themselves in (Erman & Warren 2000 ; Firth 1957). The development of phraseological competence (i.e. knowing how and when to use word combinations) is a key aspect of the development of overall second language proficiency, as it helps learners use acquired multiword blocks as units to construct novel multiword combinations (Henriksen 2013 ; Meunier & Granger 2008). But what are the sources of evidence related to our knowledge and understanding of how phraseological competence develops in a second or foreign language ? This paper seeks to address the question by reviewing the research findings that are available within the fields of learner corpus research (LCR) and psycholinguistics, with a specific focus on collocations. By doing so, it outlines the different research methods adopted, and thus the different kinds of data supporting the existing findings. It points out the cases in which a specific finding is, to some extent, supported by different kinds of evidence, and discusses the ways in which LCR and psycholinguistics have interacted so far and how they may continue to do so in future research. Finally, it describes how the desirable integration of the different research methods and different data that we find in L2 phraseology studies is in line with the current conceptualisations of complexity theory.