The Development of a Corpus-based Tool for Exploring Domain-specific Collocational Knowledge in English

Abstract

Since it was published, Coxhead`s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) has been frequently used in English for academic purposes (EAP) classrooms, included in numerous teaching materials, and re-examined in light of various domain-specific corpora. Although well-received, the AWL has been criticized for ignoring some important facts that words still tend to show irregular distributions and are used in different ways across disciplines (Hyland & Tse, 2007). One such difference concerns collocations. Academic words (e.g. analyze and concept) often co-occur with different words across domains and sometimes even refer to different meanings. What EAP students need, accordingly, is a ＂discipline-based lexical repertoire＂ (Hyland & Tse, p.235). Inspired by Hyland & Tse`s insightful remarks, we developed an online corpus-based tool, TechCollo, which is meant for EAP students to explore collocational knowledge in a domain or compare collocations across disciplines. TechCollo runs on textual data stored in three specialized corpora and utilizes frequency and some information-theoretical measures (e.g. mutual information) to decide whether co-occurring word pairs constitute collocations. In this article we describe the current version of TechCollo and how to use it in EAP studies. Particularly, we report a pilot study in which we employed TechCollo to investigate whether the AWL words take different collocates in different domain-specific corpora. This pilot basically confirmed Hyland & Tse`s indications and demonstrated that many AWL words show uneven distributions and collocational differences across disciplines.

Hyland & Tse（2007）指出，傳統的學術英語字彙表（例如：Coxhead，2000）忽略了一些重要的事實，即在不同的專業領域裡，學術字彙出現的比例不一，且常有不同的用法。舉例來說，在不同的學術領域中，學術字彙常與不同的字搭配出現，有時甚至呈現出不同的意義。因此，學術英語學習者需要的不是一套共用的學術英語字彙表，而是針對其學術領域特別整理的字彙知識。受到Hyland & Tse的啟發，我們發展了一項線上專業英語搭配詞搜尋工具，稱為TechCollo。運用TechCollo，學習者能夠比較在不同的專業英語語料庫裡，搭配詞出現的次數及使用的方式。此外，我們在此論文裡也使用TechCollo分析Coxhead的學術英語字彙在不同專業領域分佈的情形。我們的研究結果大致符合Hyland & Tse的論述，顯示學術英語字彙確實在不同專業領域出現的機率不一，且呈現明顯的搭配詞差異。