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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:2 (2018) ► pp.216–243

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The academic English collocation list

A corpus-driven study

 | Huazhong University of Science and Technology
 | University of Alabama
Published online: 5 October 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16135.lei
Abstract
The use of collocations plays an important role for the proficiency of ESL/EFL learners. Hence, educators and researchers have long tried to identify collocations typical of either academic or general English and the challenges involved in learning them. This paper proposes a comprehensive and type-balanced academic English collocation list (AECL). AECL is based on a large corpus of academic English and was created to cover the types of collocations that will be most useful to ESL/EFL learners. AECL is the result of an innovative research-based procedure that involves a five-step selection method. A comparison of the collocations on AECL with those found in well-known collocation dictionaries of general English and on three existing academic English collocation lists indicates that AECL indeed contains mainly academic rather than general English collocations. In addition, AECL is more comprehensive with regard to the types of collocations that are relevant to learners.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Key issues in research on collocation definition and identification for language learning
    • 2.1Collocation: Definition and challenges
    • 2.2Collocation identification: Existing collocation dictionaries/lists
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2The procedure of collocation extraction
      • 3.2.1Node words for collocation extraction
      • 3.2.2Types of collocation identified
      • 3.2.3Syntactic dependency relation analysis
      • 3.2.4Extraction and selection of collocations
      • 3.2.5Manual checking
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics of the AECL
    • 4.2Validation of the AECL
  • 5.Conclusion: Pedagogical and research implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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