THE USE OF THE HIGH FREQUENCY VERB MAKE IN OPINION ESSAYS BY VIETNAMESE EFL STUDENTS

This article explored how Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students used the high frequency verb MAKE in their written opinion essays, with the aim of understanding the patterns of MAKE uses and errors. The freeware AntConc (Anthony, 2020) was used to identify the different forms of the target MAKE and their frequency in 200 opinion essays written by Vietnamese EFL university students in three English writing classes as progress tests. Each concordance line in the AntConc output was subsequently examined to discover the patterns of uses of MAKE according to Altenberg and Granger’s (2001) framework. The instances of MAKE in use were further analysed for errors that occurred. The results show that causative and delexical uses of MAKE were most common and students still committed errors with MAKE. The findings have important pedagogical implications for feedback giving and EFL writing instruction.