Τhe use of learner corpora for the study of students' interlanguage in the field of L2 acquisition has been steadily growing the past twenty years with a large number of studies focusing on the use of vocabulary. Against this backdrop, the present work is a learner corpus study which aims to assess the vocabulary used by learners of Greek as L2 at B2 level, attending or about to attend Greek universities. To this end, a Β2 Greek learner corpus (B2GreLC) of 86,000 words was compiled; this was based on 428 essays written by 214 candidates who succeeded in the B2 level exams conducted by the School of Modern Greek Language, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki during the academic years 2011-2017. The main focus of the study is the adjectives used by those learners at B2 level. The particular category of items was selected due to its multi-dimensional contribution to speech, as they may form part of lexical collocations (adjective + noun), and perform multiple functions (modification, reference, predication).

The research questions of this study are as follows: (a) What adjectives do B2 learners of Greek as L2 use in their writing? (b) What is the adjectives' role in learners' texts? (c) To what extent are these adjectives part of the core vocabulary (Stubbs, 1986: 98-115; Carter, 2012: 47-60)? (d) To what extent do these adjectives reflect the coursebook material students of this level use? (e) How are those adjectives presented in this material? A total of 365 adjectives were found in B2GreLC; these were analyzed with the use of Ant Conc software. The conclusions concern both the breadth and the depth of B2 learners' knowledge of adjectives through the study of linguistic phenomena, such as polysemy, linguistic collocations, clusters, multi-word compounds and their function in speech. Finally, the use of the 20 most frequent adjectives in B2GreLC is also studied in the context of Greek L2 textbooks. The conclusions drawn concern the extent to which the most frequent adjectives in the writings of B2-level students are integrated in the teaching material of those coursebooks.

Carter, R. (2012). Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. Routledge.

Stubbs, M. (1986). Educational Linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.