A corpus-based study of academic-collocation use and patterns in postgraduate Computer Science students' writing

Collocation has been considered a problematic area for L2 learners. Various studies have been conducted to investigate native speakers‘ (NS) and non-native speakers‘ (NNS) use of different types of collocations (e.g., Durrant and Schmitt, 2009; Laufer and Waldman, 2011).These studies have indicated that, unlike NS, NNS rely on a limited set of collocations and tend to overuse them. This raises the question: if NNS tend to overuse a limited set of collocations in their academic writing, would their use of academic collocations in a specific discipline (Computer Science in this study) vary from that of NS and expert writers? This study has three main aims. First, it investigates the use of lexical academic collocations in NNS and NS Computer Science students‘ MSc dissertations and compares their uses with those by expert writers in their writing of published research articles. Second, it explores the factors behind the over/underuse of the 24shared lexical collocations among corpora. Third, it develops awareness-raising activities that could be used to help non-expert NNS students with collocation over/underuse problems. For this purpose, a corpus of 600,000 words was compiled from 55 dissertations (26 written by NS and 29 by NNS). For comparison purposes, a reference corpus of 600,269 words was compiled from 63 research articles from prestigious high impact factor Computer Science