Academic Vocabulary and Collocations

Like many students, you may be concerned that your writing doesn’t sound ‘natural’ or ‘academic’. You may find that your supervisor makes changes to your writing, with the explanation ‘that’s just the way we say it in English’, or you may have problems using prepositions appropriately. The reason for many of these difficulties lies in a characteristic of language that is called 'patterning'.

What are Language Patterns?

Many linguists now believe that when people write or speak, they do not make a series of individual word-by-word choices. Instead, writers or speakers operate by manipulating and assembling longer pieces of language that already exist in a more or less ready-made form. These ‘prefabricated chunks’ are called patterns. Patterns, then, are sequences of words that are relatively fixed in terms of their vocabulary and grammar.

Below, we discuss the two main kinds of language patterns:

Note

A useful tool for manually checking academic vocabulary collocations is the ACL Links to an external site. (Academic Collocation List).

Of course, a number of students also use free online tools (such as Grammarly Links to an external site.) to check their lexical and grammatical collocation choices. These tools are permitted under certain conditions, though it is important to confirm that they meet the University's academic integrity regulations.   

Using FLAX to Help with Subject Specific Vocabulary

Corpus software is a powerful tool to help solve language pattern problems.  A ‘corpus’ is a collection of subject-specific texts that you can search in order to establish the most frequent or conventional usage.

How does this work? Concordance software searches a corpus for every instance of a word or phrase you specify and presents the most common lexical or grammatical formulation. A concordance enables you to see easily the patterns that regularly occur with your search item.

  • One easy academic resource that we recommend is: FLAX.
    • Flax allows you to tailor by academic discipline, specifically: Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities