Collocation and technicality in EAP engineering [An article from: Journal of English for Academic Purposes]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of English for Academic Purposes, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This article explores how collocation relates to lexical technicality, and how the relationship can be exploited for teaching EAP to second-year engineering students. First, corpus data are presented to show that complex noun phrase formation is a ubiquitous feature of engineering text, and that these phrases (or collocations) are highly discipline-specific in a way that individual words are not. Next it is shown that these collocations as a class may be seen as a kind of threshold to specialised engineering discourse at the undergraduate level, and as such can be used as a basis for an EAP reading programme which is appropriate both in terms of difficulty and specialisation.