Independent corpus consultation for collocation use in academic writing by L2 graduate students

This study investigates the extent to which second language (L2) graduate students’ collocation use in academic writing improves with the independent use of a corpus tool, by analyzing the writing assignments of 115 Chinese EFL graduate students from an academic English course. The experimental group (N = 73) received brief in-class training on the use of a corpus tool developed for collocation use (Linggle) and was required to use it for their two homework assignments, whereas the control group (N = 42) was not made aware of the tool before their homework submission. The mean mutual information (MI) scores of the collocations used in the two writing assignments were compared between the experimental and control groups to evaluate the effect of independent corpus consultation (ICC). Overall, the results showed a marginally higher mean MI score for the experimental group, and the differences varied by collocation type. Survey results further revealed that fewer than 40% of the participants frequently used the tool, and the participants reported difficulties in using the query syntax, understanding corpus results, and maintaining technical access to the tool. Our findings have useful pedagogical implications for considering independent corpus consultation as a supplementary tool for academic English instruction.