A frequency, coverage, and dispersion analysis of the academic collocation list in university student writing

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates whether cross-disciplinary academic collocation lists are of equal importance to EAP (English for academic purposes) learners across different disciplines. We target Ackermann and Chen’s (Ackermann, Kirsten & Yu-Hua Chen. 2013. Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL)–A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(4). 235–247) Academic Collocation List (ACL) and conduct a frequency, coverage, and dispersion analysis of its 2,464 pairs in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. Using BAWE data, we also examine whether university students increase use of academic collocations across years. Generally, our results indicate that cover-all academic collocation lists, like academic word lists, show uneven frequency distributions across disciplines; the ACL covers considerably more word combinations in soft than hard sciences. According to our dispersion analysis, furthermore, an important cause for such skewed distributions is that a substantial part of the ACL (i.e., almost 25 %) is in actuality discipline-specific rather than generic collocations. In terms of collocation development, we do observe steady increases across years. Interestingly, university students throughout levels not only use more academic collocations, but display a stronger tendency to raise the proportion of discipline-specific collocations in writing. This study is novel as it systematically examines distributions and developments of academic collocations, and is pedagogically valuable in that it collects 483 ACL entries which are suitable targets for EAP learning.