Abstract:

Accuracy and Fluency are two factors which determine the competence in language usage (Srivastava, 2014). Traditional grammarians always emphasize the importance of grammatical rules during language teaching/learning. It results in the development of accuracy than fluency among non-native language users. The paper deals with the issue that accuracy leads non-native language users to produce more complex phrases rather than short phrases, the salient trait of fluency. This study investigates and compares the complexity of noun-phrases and verb phrases between two corpora: one comprises two novels by Pakistani English fiction authors (CPEFA) and the other comprises two novels of the same genre by native authors (CNEFA). Both corpora have been processed upon the n-gram/cluster tool of AntConc (3.5.8) software to observe the frequency of patterns of the said phrases. The results show that Pakistani English fiction authors use more complex phrases as compared to English native authors. The study has strong pedagogical implications for academia in Asian countries to revise the syllabus of English language course and make the teachers/learners realize the importance of short phrases of fixed expression rather than grammatical accuracy with complicated phrases.

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