A Corpus-based study of Academic-Collocations' Use and Patterns

This book investigates the most frequent academic collocations¿use and patterns in the writing of postgraduate Computer Science students. It has three main aims. First, it investigates the use of lexical academic collocations in NNS and NS Computer Science students¿ MSc dissertations and compares their uses with those by expert writers in their writing of published research articles. Second, it explores the factors behind the over/underuse of the 24 shared lexical collocations among corpora. Third, it develops awareness-raising activities that could be used to help non-expert NNS students with collocation over/underuse problems.For this purpose, a corpus of 600,000 words was compiled from 55 dissertations (26 written by NS and 29 by NNS). For comparison purposes, a reference corpus of 600,269 words was compiled from 63 research articles from prestigious high-impact factor Computer Science academic journals.The Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) was used to develop lists of the most frequent academic words in the student corpora, whose collocations were examined.Both quantitative and qualitative methods approach were applied.