A quantitative analysis of collocations in Brazilian and British students’ academic writing

Marine Laísa Matte; Rozane Rodrigues Rebechi

doi:10.22168/2237-6321-21490

Autores/as

Marine Laísa Matte Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Rozane Rodrigues Rebechi Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22168/2237-6321-21490

Palabras clave:

Collocations. Academic English. Academic Collocation List. BAWE. BrAWE.

Resumen

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.

Biografía del autor/a

Marine Laísa Matte, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Marine Laísa Matte é aluna de mestrado em Linguística Aplicada no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Seus principais interesses de pesquisa são ensino de línguas adicionais e Linguística de Corpus como metodologia de pesquisa e ensino.
Rozane Rodrigues Rebechi, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Rozane Rodrigues Rebechi é professora adjunta da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), atuando na graduação e pós-graduação do Instituto de Letras. Possui especialização em Tradução e mestrado e doutorado em Estudos Linguísticos e Literários em Inglês pela Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Suas principais áreas de atuação são Ensino de Inglês como Língua Estrangeira, Tradução e Terminologia, com enfoque na utilização da Linguística de Corpus como metodologia.

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