Collocations and collocation types in ESP textbooks: Quantitative pedagogical analysis

• Published in: Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta (1990) Vol. 2016; no. 46-4; pp. 445 - 464
• Main Authors: Bogdanović, Vesna, Mirović, Ivana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Philosophy, Kosovska Mitrovica 2016
• Subjects: collocate; collocation; ESP; scientific collocations; technical vocabulary
• ISSN: 0354-3293; 2217-8082
• DOI: 10.5937/zrffp46-11874

The term collocation, even though it is rather common in the English language grammar, it is not a well known or commonly used term in the textbooks and scientific papers written in the Serbian language. Collocating is usually defined as a natural appearance of two (or more) words, which are usually one next to another even though they can be separated in the text, while collocations are defined as words with natural semantic and/or syntactic relations being joined together in a sentence. Collocations are naturally used in all English written texts, including scientific texts and papers. Using two textbooks for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for intermediate students' courses, this paper presents the frequency of collocations and their typology. The paper tries to investigate the relationship between lexical and grammatical collocations written in the ESP texts and the reasons for their presence. There is an overview of the most used subtypes of lexical collocations as well. Furthermore, on applying the basic corpus analysis based on the quantitative analysis, the paper presents the number of open, restricted and bound collocations in ESP texts, trying to draw conclusions on their frequency and hence the modes for their learning. There is also a section related to the number and usage of scientific collocations, both common scientific and narrow-professional ones. The conclusion is that the number of present collocations in the selected two textbooks imposes a demand for further analysis of these lexical connections, as well as new modes for their teaching and presentations to the English learning students.