Using COCA to Foster Students’ Use of English Collocations in Academic Writing

Abstract

[EN] Using Corpora in foreign language teaching is on of the very efficient ways in proposing solutions for pedagogical issues, either through adopting a corpus-based teaching approach or through using the corpus in developing material. Developing academic writing competence is a challenging pedagogical issue for English teachers as well as learners. Second language learners come across considerable challenges as they are developing their academic writing competence. One of these challenges is the use of English collocations since that learning about collocations is of a crucial importance. Hence, due to the wide variety of collocations and their different types, one of the challenges that face both L2 learners of English as well as teachers is how to use English collocations successfully in academic writing due to the fact that collocational awareness and proficiency is a necessity for competent written discourse especially in academic writing. Therefore, academic writing proficiency is one of the major problematic areas that university students encounter. This paper focuses on how to direct students to a more effective use of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in order to foster their learning process of different English collocations, and use English collocations accurately in their academic writings. This paper illustrates search mechanisms and search strings that could be implemented effectively on COCA to get more representative and accurate collocation results. Keywords: corpus, academic writing, collocations, COCA