A Corpus-Based Tool for Exploring Domain-Specific Collocations in English

Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) has been frequently used in EAP classrooms and re-examined in light of various domain-specific corpora. Although well-received, the AWL has been criticized for ignoring the fact that words tend to show irregular distributions and be used in different ways across disciplines (Hyland and Tse, 2007). One such difference concerns collocations. Academic words (e.g. analyze) often co-occur with different words across domains and contain different meanings. What EAP students need is a “disciplinebased lexical repertoire” (p.235). Inspired by Hyland and Tse, we develop an online corpus-based tool, TechCollo, which is meant for EAP students to explore collocations in one domain or compare collocations across disciplines. It runs on textual data from six specialized corpora and utilizes frequency, traditional mutual information, and normalized MI (Wible et al., 2004) as measures to decide whether co-occurring word pairs constitute collocations. In this article we describe the current released version of TechCollo and how to use it in EAP studies. Additionally, we discuss a pilot study in which we used TechCollo to investigate whether the AWL words take different collocates in different domainspecific corpora. This pilot basically confirmed Hyland and Tse and demonstrates that many AWL words show uneven distributions and collocational differences across domains.