Awareness of Academic Adjective-Noun Collocations in Theory and Pedagogy: A Corpus and List-based Study

Collocations represent one of the most complex areas of language acquisition for highly proficient language learners. Determining what constitutes a collocation, and which collocations are most relevant for language learners, are challenges that have become particularly relevant areas of research as corpus-based research has become increasingly widespread. The aim of the present study is to compare and assess common methods of collocation delineation in order to create an awareness of the differences in these standards and to better understand the relevance of these methods to the pedagogy of academic collocations. Three standards of collocation delineation (frequency and MI limits in two academic sub-corpora – of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English – as well as the published Academic Collocation List (Ackermann & Chen, 2013)) were used to identify adjective-noun collocations in both advanced learner and native speaker essays. A rating session was conducted with seven ESL instructors, all currently pursuing or already in possession of an MA degree in Linguistics, to collect rater judgments on the viability of a sample of the collected word pairsas collocations, academic collocations, and their usefulness in an academic ESL or EFL context. It was found that different standards produced ----significantly----different lists of collocations from the text samples, and that no one standard was a strong predictor of rater judgment of pedagogical utility. However, academic collocations defined as such by all three standards correlated most strongly with positive rater judgments of pedagogical utility. Additionally, the result of Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) indicating that MI is a more significant factor in utility judgments than frequency was corroborated through a preliminary regression analysis. The study will provide insights for researchers and language instructors about the methods used to determine collocations for research and pedagogy, and to prompt a conversation about the challenges associated with this complex aspect of the lexicon.