Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus LinguisticsVol. 23:2 (2018) ► pp.216–243
The academic English collocation list
A corpus-driven study
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.
Keywords: Academic English, collocations, general English, word list
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
References
Ackermann, K., & Chen, Y. H.
(2013) Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL) – A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(4), 235–247. 
Bahns, J., & Eldaw, M.
(1993) Should we teach EFL students collocations? System, 21(1), 101–114.
Bartsch, S.
(2004) Structural and Functional Properties of Collocations in English: A Corpus Study of Lexical and Pragmatic Constraints on Lexical Co-occurrence. Tübingen: Narr.
Benson, M., Benson, E., & Ilson, R.
(2009) The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (3rd ed.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Biber, D., & Conrad, S.
(1999) Lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose. In H. Hasselgard & S. Oksfjell (Eds.), Out of Corpora: Studies in Honor of Stig Johansson (pp. 181–190). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Biskup, D.
(1992) L1 influence on learners’ rendering of English collocations: A Polish/German empirical study. In P. J. L. Arnaud & H. Bejoint (Eds.), Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics (pp. 85–93). London: Macmillan.
Celce-Murcia, M. & Larsen-Freeman, D.
(1999) The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Chan, T. P., & Liou, H. C.
(2005) Effects of web-based concordancing instruction on EFL students’ learning of verb-noun collocations. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(3), 231–251.
Chon, Y., & Shin, D.
(2013) A corpus-driven analysis of spoken and written academic collocations. Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, 16(3), 11–38.
Church, K. W., & Hanks, P.
(1990) Word association, norms, mutual information, and lexicography. Computational Linguistics, 16(1), 22–29.
Church, K. W., Gale, W., Hanks, P., Hindle, R. & Moon, R.
(1994) Lexical substitutability. In B. T. S. Atkins & A. Zampolli (Eds.), Computational Approaches to the Lexicon (pp. 153–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coffey, S.
(2011) A new pedagogical dictionary of English collocations. International Journal of Lexicography, 24(3), 328–341.
Coxhead, A.
(2000) A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238.
Crossley, S., Salsbury, T., & McNamara, D.
(2015) Assessing lexical proficiency using analytic ratings: A case for collocation accuracy. Applied Linguistics, 36(5), 570–590.
Davies, M.
(2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2012). Available online at [URL] (last accessed May 2018).
Diani, G.
(2009) Reporting and evaluation in English book review articles: A cross-disciplinary study. In K. Hyland & G. Diani (Eds.), Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings (pp. 87–104). New York, NY: Palgrave.
Durrant, P.
(2009) Investigating the viability of a collocation list for students of English for academic purposes. English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 157–169.
Gardner, D., & Davies, M.
(2014) A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 305–327.
Granger, S.
(1998) Prefabricated patterns in advanced EFL writing: Collocations and formulae. In A. Cowie (Ed.), Phraseology (pp. 145–160). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hausmann, F. J.
(1984) Wortschatzlernen ist kollokationslernen. Praxis des Neusprachlichen Unterrichts, 31(1), 395–406.
Hill, J., & Lewis, M.
(1997) LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
Howarth, P.
(1998) Phraseology and second language proficiency. Applied Linguistics, 19(1), 24–44.
Hunston, S.
(2002) Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyland, K.
(2008) As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27(1), 4–21.
Hyland, K., & Milton, J.
(1997) Qualification and certainty in L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 6(2), 183–205.
Laufer, B., & Waldman, T.
(2011) Verb-noun collocations in second language writing: A corpus analysis of learners’ English. Language Learning, 61(2), 647–672.
Lea, D., Crowther, J., & Dignen, S.
(2002) Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, M.
(Ed.) (2000) Teaching Collocation: Further Development in the Lexical Approach. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
(2002) Implementing the Lexical Approach. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Liu, D.
(2010) Going beyond patterns: Involving cognitive analysis in the learning of collocations. TESOL Quarterly, 44(1), 4–30.
(2011) The most-frequently used English phrasal verbs in American and British English: A multi-corpus examination. TESOL Quarterly. 45(4), 661–688.
(2012) The most frequently-used multi-word constructions in academic written English: A multi-corpus study. English for Specific Purposes. 31(1), 25–35.
Liu, D., & Lei, L.
(2018, preview published online). The appeal to political sentiment: An analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s speech themes and discourse strategies in the 2016 presidential election. Discourse, Context & Media.
Liu, D., & Zhong, S.
(2016) L2 vs. L1 use of synonymy: An empirical study of synonym use/acquisition, Applied Linguistics, 37(2), 239–261.
Manning, C. D., Surdeanu, M., Bauer, J., Finkel, J., Bethard, S. J., & McClosky, D.
(2014) The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit. Available at [URL] (last accessed July 2018).
Martinez, R., & Schmitt, N.
(2012) A phrasal expressions list. Applied Linguistics 33(3), 299–320
Nesselhauf, N.
(2003) The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some implications for teaching. Applied Linguistics, 24(2), 223–242.
Pawley, A., & Syder, F. H.
(1983) Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J. C. Richards & R. W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 191–226). London: Longman.
Rundell, M.
(2010) Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for Learners of English. London: Macmillan.
Schmitt, N.
(2016) The PHRASal Expressions (PHRASE) List User’s Guide. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed May 2016).
Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, N. C.
(2010) An academic formulas list: New methods in phraseology research. Applied Linguistics, 31(4), 487–512.
Sinclair, J.
(1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Siyanova, A., & Schmitt, N.
(2008) L2 learner production and processing of collocation: A multi-study perspective. Canadian Modern Language Review, 64(3), 429–458.
Toutanova, K., Klein, D., Manning, C. D., & Singer, Y.
(2003) Feature-rich part-of-speech tagging with a cyclic dependency network (pp. 173–180). The 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology (Volume 11), Association for Computational Linguistics, Edmonton, Canada.
Uhrig, P., & Proisl, T.
(2012) Less hay, more needles – Using dependency-annotated corpora to provide lexicographers with more accurate lists of collocation candidates. Lexicographica, 28(1), 141–180.
Webb, S., & Kagimoto, W.
(2009) The effects of vocabulary learning on collocation and meaning. TESOL Quarterly, 43(1), 55–77.
Cited by
Cited by 30 other publications
Albertson, Brendon
2021. TextMix: using NLP and APIs to generate chunked sentence scramble tasks. In CALL and professionalisation: short papers from EUROCALL 2021, ► pp. 6 ff. 
Arndt, Rebeca
2024. Corpus-based tool: A digital science collocation list for multilingual middle school learners. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 100085 ff.
Ballance, Oliver James
2022. Methodological considerations for the use of mutual information: Examining the role of context in collocation research. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 1:3 ► pp. 100024 ff.
Csomay, Enikó
2020. A corpus-based study of academic word use in EFL student writing. In Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 95], ► pp. 10 ff.
Deng, Yaochen & Dilin Liu
2022. A multi-dimensional comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of association measures in collocation extraction. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Deng, Yaochen, Dilin Liu & Shuqiong Wu
2022. Academic English verbs across disciplines: A corpus study and its implications. Ampersand 9 ► pp. 100093 ff.
Ding, Chen, Barry Lee Reynolds, Csaba Z. Szabo & Griet Boone
2024. Assessing English language learners’ collocation knowledge: a systematic review of receptive and productive measurements. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 0:0
Esfandiari, Rajab & Mohammad Ahmadi
2023. Phraseological Complexity and Academic Writing Proficiency in Abstracts Authored by Student and Expert Writers. English Teaching & Learning 47:4 ► pp. 429 ff.
Green, Clarence
2019. Enriching the academic wordlist and Secondary Vocabulary Lists with lexicogrammar: Toward a pattern grammar of academic vocabulary. System 87 ► pp. 102158 ff.
Green, Clarence
2019. A multilevel description of textbook linguistic complexity across disciplines: Leveraging NLP to support disciplinary literacy. Linguistics and Education 53 ► pp. 100748 ff.
He, Mengyu & Leng Hong Ang
2023. Profiling a microeconomics noun collocation list: A corpus-based approach. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 41:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Hu, Yiyang & Qingshun He
2023. A Corpus-Based Study of the Distributions of Adnominals Across Registers and Disciplines. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 30:2 ► pp. 183 ff.
Huang, Ping-Yu
2023. A frequency, coverage, and dispersion analysis of the academic collocation list in university student writing. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 0:0
Lin, Phoebe
2022. Developing an intelligent tool for computer-assisted formulaic language learning from YouTube videos. ReCALL 34:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Liu, Bin, Jing Wang & Le Sun
2022. Collocation Features in Translated Texts Based on English Analogy Corpus. Scientific Programming 2022 ► pp. 1 ff.
Meng, Fanqi, Yujie Zheng, Songbin Bao, Jingdong Wang & Shuaisong Yang
2022. Formulaic language identification model based on GCN fusing associated information. PeerJ Computer Science 8 ► pp. e984 ff.
Nguyen, Thi My Hang & Averil Coxhead
2023. Evaluating multiword unit word lists for academic purposes. ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 174:1 ► pp. 83 ff.
Oakey, David
2020. Phrases in EAP academic writing pedagogy: Illuminating Halliday’s influence on research and practice. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 44 ► pp. 100829 ff.
Rogers, James, Amanda Müller, Frank E. Daulton, Paul Dickinson, Cosmin Florescu, Gordon Reid & Tim Stoeckel
2021. The creation and application of a large-scale corpus-based academic multi-word unit list. English for Specific Purposes 62 ► pp. 142 ff.
Siengsanoh, Boonyakorn
2021. The Development of an Academic Collocation List for Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Students. rEFLections 28:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Skoufaki, Sophia & Bojana Petrić
2021. Exploring polysemy in the Academic Vocabulary List: A lexicographic approach. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 54 ► pp. 101038 ff.
Su, Qi, Chen Gu & Pengyuan Liu
2024. Association measures for collocation extraction. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 29:1 ► pp. 59 ff.
Sun, Shuyi Amelia & Tsy Yih
2022. Book review. System 108 ► pp. 102827 ff.
Szudarski, Paweł
2023. Collocations, Corpora and Language Learning,
Wingrove, Peter
2022. Academic lexical coverage in TED talks and academic lectures. English for Specific Purposes 65 ► pp. 79 ff.
Wongkhan, Prueksa & Atikhom Thienthong
2021. EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Academic Collocation and Synonymy: Does their Academic Experience Matter?. RELC Journal 52:3 ► pp. 523 ff.
Xia, Detong, Yudi Chen & Hye K. Pae
2023. Lexical and grammatical collocations in beginning and intermediate L2 argumentative essays: a bigram study. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 61:4 ► pp. 1421 ff.
Zhou, Qihong
2021. The Construction of a Collocation List Based on Academic Papers of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12278], ► pp. 576 ff.
Zuppardi, Maria Carolina & Tony Berber Sardinha
2020. A multi-dimensional view of collocations in academic writing. In Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 95], ► pp. 334 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 may 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.