A Comparative Study on the Lexical Collocations in Academic Discourse by International Scholars and Chinese EFL Learners

Abstract

Lexical collocations are essential in academic English and present considerable challenges for L2 learners. This study compiled three text corpora: one from academic written texts published in top international linguistics journals, and the others from MA theses and doctoral dissertations of Chinese college students majoring in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. An Academic Collocation List (ACL) was initially created from the journal articles and then the collocation lists of the top 200 verbs were compared across the three corpora. The study identified potential collocates for over 2,400 content words in the ICAE (International Corpus of Academic English) journal articles, resulting in 375 potential combinations. Among these, noun combinations (adj+n, n+n) accounted for nearly 70% of the total entries, followed by verb+noun/adj combinations, adv+adj combinations, and verb+adv combinations. Statistical analysis revealed significant differences between Chinese EFL learners and international scholars, with a larger discrepancy observed between MA theses and journal articles than between doctoral dissertations and journal articles. Chinese EFL learners tended to overuse a limited set of collocations that, while grammatically correct, often sounded unnatural to native speakers. Additionally, the verb+noun combinations used by Chinese EFL learners were frequently physically and semantically different from those employed by international scholars. These findings underscore the need for targeted pedagogical interventions to improve the collocational competence of Chinese EFL learners.