Investigating academic phraseology through combinations of very frequent words: A methodological exploration

This study demonstrates an approach based on findings from phraseology which can be used to identify potentially useful phrases in a text by starting with continuous or discontinuous sequences of very frequent words. These combinations are then searched in a corpus of academic texts to find their common collocates and ascertain whether the particular wording chosen in the text is an exemplar of a recurrent phrase. The phrases identified are also evaluated in terms of whether they are worthy of pedagogic attention bearing in mind their distinctiveness to academic prose and their functions. The approach thus offers practitioners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) a way of identifying and evaluating common phrases in their own texts. Pedagogic materials are also presented which are based on the findings of such searches and which aim to raise learner awareness of phraseology in academic English.