A quantitative analysis of collocations in Brazilian and British students’ academic writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22168/2237-6321-21490Keywords:
Collocations. Academic English. Academic Collocation List. BAWE. BrAWE.Abstract
Language is formulaic in nature, which means that appropriate writing goes beyond knowing isolated words. The objective of this paper is to analyze the quantitative difference in the use of collocations of the Academic Collocation List (ACL) in two academic corpora, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). In order to conduct this analysis, we used corpus linguistics as our methodology. The results show that only few collocations of ACL came up as statistically significant when we investigated the BrAWE corpus in comparison with BAWE, indicating that Brazilians use academic collocations appropriately when compared to British. This research points to the importance of focusing on collocations in Academic English teaching contexts, since they cooperate to guarantee conventionality in language. Moreover, both British and Brazilians use academic collocations that are not necessarily present in ACL, suggesting a possible mismatch between what is prescribed and what is actually used in authentic language.
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