Second language learners and real-life contexts of writing Katja Mäntylä and Mirja Tarnanen 73 Second language learners and real-life contexts of writing Katja Mäntylä & Mirja Tarnanen University of Jyväskylä katja.mantyla@jyu.fi mirja.tarnanen@jyu.fi Formulaic sequences are significant in vocabulary acquisition and use. In writing various content phrases and metatextual expressions are important in creating a coherent and cohesive text. There are quite a few studies on phrasal expressions and second language acquisition (SLA), but connected to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) phrase are understudied. In this paper, we wanted to see how phrases in two typologically different languages, Finnish and English, appear in learner texts. The data were collected as part of the CEFLING project that examines how L2 proficiency develops across CEFR levels. The participants were 12-15- year-old students who studied either English as a foreign language or Finnish as a second language. Each wrote 3-4 texts that were rated using the CEFR scale by four trained raters. For this study, we chose two texts that represented different levels of formality, a message to the teacher and a message to an internet store. Of these, we picked 15 texts per task and per level in each language. For practical reasons we concentrated on levels A1- B1; there were very few texts on B2 level, all of which were included in the analysis. Thus, we ended up with 192 texts altogether. Defining and identifying something as a formulaic sequence is not without problems (cf. Wray 2008). We included various types of fixed phrases as formulaic sequences, for instance, collocations, prepositional phrases in English and verbal structures in Finnish. We scanned the performances for sequences, and categorized the sequences according to their functions, following Moon’s (1998) classification (based on Halliday’s (1994) model). In addition to formulae we looked at cohesive links as cohesion is significant in L2 lexical development (e.g. Crossley & McNamara 2009). Moon (1998) divides sequences into informative, situational, organizational, evaluative and modal. Of these, we paid special attention to modality and organization, and in this respect, extended our analysis to single orthographical words. Since both texts were e-mail messages, we also analysed beginning and ending of the message. This was necessary 18