Responding to research challenges related to studying L2 collocational use in professional academic discourse

Abstract

This study describes the English collocational use of non-native university teachers from two different disciplines lecturing in an Englishmedium instruction context at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The primary focus is on how we addressed the research challenges involved in identifying and classifying collocations used by L2 speakers in advanced, domain-specifc oral academic discourse. The main fndings seem to suggest that to map an informant’s complete collocational use and to get an understanding of disciplinary differences, we need to not only take account of general, academic and domain-specifc collocations but also need to cover the full range of both lexical and grammatical collocations.