The Development of the Veterinary Medicine Academic English Collocation List (VMCL)

Özer M., Akbaş E.

ILTERG 2023, Nevşehir, Turkey, 2 - 03 June 2023, pp.1-2

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Full Text
  • City: Nevşehir
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.1-2
  • Abdullah Gül University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the development of the Veterinary Medicine Academic English Collocation List

(VMCL). To extract a list of collocations, we used the Veterinary Medicine Corpus (the VMC; Özer & Akbaş, 2022),

a corpus of 1449 open-access research articles (approximately 8 million words) using the Veterinary Medicine

Academic Word List (VMAWL; Özer & Akbaş, 2022). The corpus featured the March 2022 iteration of articles

withdrawn via Anthony’s (2019) AntCorGen v 1.1.2. The 835 nodes from the VMAWL were analysed on LancsBox

v 6.0 (Brezina et al., 2020) using the collocational association measures following Balance (2022), Brezina et al.

(2015), and Brezina (2018). The GraphColl utility in LancsBox was set to the following collocation parameters

notation: MI2(3), L5R5, C5, NC(5). Types were preferred over lemmas (Chon & Shin, 2013; Durrant, 2009;

Stubbs, 1996) to reveal a fuller spectrum of collocational relations between the nodes and collocates (Durrant, 2009).

The output Ξles from LancsBox were analysed manually according to some criteria borrowed from Ackerman &

Chen (2013), Lei & Liu (2018), and Brezina & Gablasova (2013). Only “grammatically well-formed” (Chon & Shin,

2013; p. 9) “combinations of lexical words” (Durrant, 2009; p. 157) were taken into account, and prepositions were

added where necessary (Ackerman & Chen, 2013). An expert-judged approach was adopted upon the Ξnalisation of

manual treatment so that the preliminary list can be linguistically valid and a more pedagogically-driven list could be

created. SigniΞcant diΛerences between the V-Coll and such academic collocation lists as ACL (Ackerman & Chen,

2013) and AECL (Lei & Liu, 2018) were documented. The VMCL will be used in the development of teaching

materials for a corpus-based discipline-speciΞc academic writing course to help increase the collocational competence

of veterinary medicine postgraduate students.


Keywords: Corpus, Collocation, Veterinary Medicine