ERIC Number: EJ1078934
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1814-9448
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
The Development of a Corpus-Based Tool for Exploring Domain-Specific Collocational Knowledge in English
Huang, Ping-Yu; Chen, Chien-Ming; Tsao, Nai-Lung; Wible, David
Taiwan Journal of TESOL, v12 n2 p117-141 2015
Since it was published, Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) has been frequently used in English for academic purposes (EAP) classrooms, included in numerous teaching materials, and re-examined in light of various domain-specific corpora. Although well-received, the AWL has been criticized for ignoring some important facts that words still tend to show irregular distributions and are used in different ways across disciplines (Hyland & Tse, 2007). One such difference concerns collocations. Academic words (e.g. "analyze" and "concept") often co-occur with different words across domains and sometimes even refer to different meanings. What EAP students need, accordingly, is a "discipline-based lexical repertoire" (Hyland & Tse, p.235). Inspired by Hyland & Tse's insightful remarks, we developed an online corpus-based tool, "TechCollo," which is meant for EAP students to explore collocational knowledge in a domain or compare collocations across disciplines. TechCollo runs on textual data stored in three specialized corpora and utilizes frequency and some information-theoretical measures (e.g. mutual information) to decide whether co-occurring word pairs constitute collocations. In this article we describe the current version of TechCollo and how to use it in EAP studies. Particularly, we report a pilot study in which we employed TechCollo to investigate whether the AWL words take different collocates in different domain-specific corpora. This pilot basically confirmed Hyland & Tse's indications and demonstrated that many AWL words show uneven distributions and collocational differences across disciplines.
Descriptors: English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Academic Discourse, Phrase Structure, Computational Linguistics, English for Academic Purposes, Comparative Analysis, Word Lists, Pilot Projects, Second Language Instruction, Medicine, Engineering, Teaching Methods
National Chengchi University Department of English. 64 Sec 2 ZhiNan Road, Wenshan District, Taipei 11605, Taiwan, R.O.C. Tel: 886-2-2938-7248; Fax: 886-2-2939-0510; e-mail: tjtesol@nccu.edu.tw; Web site: http://tjtesol.nccu.edu.tw
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A