ABSTRACT
Alongside extensive contributions to our understanding of word frequency across and within disciplines, genres, registers, and professional domains, corpus linguistics has contributed rich knowledge of collocations, i.e., how words pattern together. Word meaning is often defined by collocations. To illustrate, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, “student” collocates with “college, teacher, learning, university” – words that define it in the Cambridge Dictionary Online: “a person who is learning at a college or university”. However, what if you are training to be a teacher? Education reading material in the same corpus shows the domain-specific collocations of “student” reflect important disciplinary concepts, e.g. “achievement, outcomes, progress, retention, persistence”. Teaching corpus-derived collocations in ESP, therefore, can support both fluency and conceptual learning, i.e. disciplinary literacy. This chapter details how corpus research into collocations has informed English language teaching and learning, with a focus on English for specific purposes. It reviews the research and pedagogical shifts from traditional word lists to resources including collocations, and how teachers and researchers identify useful collocations. The subject specificity of collocations is discussed, as well as differences between educational contexts, e.g. tertiary/secondary/primary. Research-based collocation lists available for EAP/ESP are reviewed, and the chapter closes with areas of future research.
