The Academic Collocation List (ACL)

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This video is brought to you by eapfoundation.com, the website for all your academic English needs
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So this video will focus on the Academic Collocations List, or ACL
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And I'll be looking at three things. First, we'll see what collocations are
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Then we'll look in detail at the Academic Collocations List with some examples
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And I'll finish up by giving some ideas about how you can learn academic collocations
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So let's begin by considering what collocations are. So the word collocation can be broken down into the prefix co- and the root location
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Co- means together, while location means place. And a collocation is two or more words that often occur, in other words are placed, together
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A simple example of a collocation is heavy rain. This is an adjective and noun collocation
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And this is an everyday, not an academic collocation. And I'm going to look at the same collocation in different languages
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because collocations are not just something that exist in English. In fact, about half of collocation errors are because of mother tongue interference
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So in Chinese, this is 大雨 dà yǔ, which means big rain
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French and German are actually similar. In French, it's fort prix. And in German, stark regen, which means strong rain
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In Spanish, it's lluvia pesada, which, like English, means heavy rain. In Persian, it is baran shadid, which means intense rain
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While in Arabic, it is matakhazir, which means copious rain. And if you use one of these other collocations, strong rain, big rain, intense rain
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people might understand you, or they might not. But anyway, it would not sound natural
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So using the right collocations in writing or speaking will help you to communicate the message and to sound more natural
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So let's move on to look at the academic collocations list. So this is a list that was developed by two researchers, Kirsten Ackerman and Yuhua Chen
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using the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English, PICAE. And the academic collocations list contains 2,469 of the most frequent collocations
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in written academic English. And in the corpus under study, it covers 1.4% of texts
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which compares to 0.1% of general English texts. And the collocations contained in the list are only lexical collocations
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not grammatical collocations. In other words, the list contains adjective and noun collocations
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verb and noun, adverb and adjective, adverb and past participle, noun and noun, verb and adjective, verb and adverb, and adverb and verb collocations
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These are lexical collocations. And what it doesn't contain is grammatical collocations
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verb and preposition, such as look at, look into, or adjective and preposition, such as good at, interested in, beneficial for, and so on
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So let's look in more detail at the different types. So here they're listed in order of frequency
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So the most common type of academic collocation are adjective and noun collocations
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And there are 1,773 of these, which means adjective and noun collocations comprise 72% of all the collocations in the ACL
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Why are there so many of this type? Well, it might be because of the high use of nouns in academic writing
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Academic writing tends to use lots of nouns or noun phrases, nominalisation
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So let's have some examples. I'll just give six examples of adjective and noun collocations
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So academic achievement, experimental research, financial support, significant reduction, biological evolution, and physical health
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Now those are just some examples. The second most common type are verb and noun collocations
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And there are 310 of these, or 13% of collocations in the ACL
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So together, the first two types, adjective and noun, verb and noun, comprise 85% of collocations in the ACL
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So examples of these, achieve a goal, reduce emissions, resolve a conflict, accept responsibility
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The next most common type, adverb and adjective. There are 124 adverb and adjective collocations in the ACL, which makes up 5%
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For example, clearly visible, freely available. Adverb and past participle also have 124 collocations in the list, also 5%
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For example, carefully controlled, easily understood. There are 62 noun and noun collocations, which is 3%
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For example, background knowledge, survey data. 30 verb and adjective collocations, 1% of the total
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For example, prove useful, seem unlikely. 29 verb and adverb collocations, again 1%, such as behave differently, vary widely
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And 17 adverb and verb collocations, also 1%, actually less than 1%
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For example, directly affect, and strongly suggest. So let's look now at some ideas about how to learn academic collocations
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So one way you can learn collocations is to study them by type
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For example, adjective and noun collocations. Another idea is to study collocation families
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A third idea is to use the ACL highlighter. Another idea is to combine study of the academic collocations list with the academic word list
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Those four ideas can all be done using the EAP Foundation website
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So here's the page on academic collocations list. This gives all of the words in the ACL sorted by type
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So you can see here the adjective and noun collocations at the top
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And as I said, this is 72% of the total, so there are a lot of collocations here
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Then adverb and adjective collocations. Adverb and verb collocations, not so many of those
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Adverb and past participle. Noun and noun collocations. Verb and adjective, again, not many
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Verb and adverb. And verb and noun, which, remember, are the second most common type, so quite a few of those
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So studying collocations by different type is one way that you can learn collocations
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Perhaps a more useful way is the second idea, to study collocation families
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So this page gives, again, the academic collocation list collocations, but sorted into families, grouped under headwords
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So the first three entries only have a single collocation, but then if we go down to the fourth one, which has the headword Academy
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you can see many different collocations in this list. Academic circles, academic achievement, which we just saw
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academic career, academic community, academic debate, and so on. So learning words by studying the collocation families
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is another way to learn words in the academic collocations list. So the third idea I just gave was using the ACL highlighter
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Again, this is on the EAP Foundation website. So to demonstrate this, I'm going to take the text from the British Medical Journal
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So I'm just going to highlight the beginning part of this article. This is just an example of an academic text
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Paste it into the highlighter. And then you can see here the academic collocations in the text
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So here we have media coverage, domestic violence, sexual violence, natural disasters
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increase the likelihood, close contact, and provide support. And the ACL highlighter is useful because it also sorts them by type
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Remember, the ACL covers 1.4% of text, so we're not expecting very many collocations to appear in the total text
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And so the fourth way I just gave of studying academic collocations
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is to combine study with the academic word list, which you might be studying already
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So one tool that could be used to do this, again on the EAP Foundation website
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is what's called the AWL Word Finder. So let's choose a word here
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Let's just choose assess, a random word. So you can see here, so this gives information about the word
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related word form, meaning, pronunciation. But it also lists words in the academic collocations list
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A different example, benefit. Again, listing words in the academic collocations list
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Beneficial effects provide a benefit. Economic benefits, potential benefits. Actually, another way that you can combine study of the AWL and the ACL
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is on the page which listed words by head word. You can use the All widget for this
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and then this will highlight words which are contained in the AWL
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So you can see the first example, cognitive ability. Neither of those words are in the AWL
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The second example, abstract concept. Both of those words are in the AWL
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The third example, sexual abuse. Sexual is in the AWL. Abuse is not
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So another way that you can learn academic collocations is to learn common frames
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And this idea was actually given by Ackerman and Chen in their original article. Some of the other ideas here were as well
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So for example, the word highly has several collocations in the list
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But six of them are with the past participle. So we have highly charged, highly correlated with
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highly developed, highly educated, highly structured, and highly valued. So studying some frames like adjective and past participle
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might be another way to learn words in the academic collocations list. And the last idea I'd like to give you is to learn a few every day
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maybe just ten every day. And let's try that because we had ten collocations in this video
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How many of them do you remember? So these are the images that went with the collocations
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So the first one is academic achievement, financial support, reduce emissions
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experimental research, significant reduction, physical health
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biological evolution, resolve a conflict, accept responsibility
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and achieve a goal. So that's the end of the video. So we looked at three things
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We've seen what collocations are. We've seen what the academic collocation list is, the ACL
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And we've seen six ways to learn academic collocations. So that's the end of the video
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I hope you found it helpful. And I hope you've learned something. And I hope you've learned something. And I hope you've learned something
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And I hope you've learned something. And I hope you've learned something. And I hope you've learned something. And I hope you've learned something
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And I hope you've learned something

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The Academic Collocation List (ACL)

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