Academic Collocations in Egyptian Medical Abstracts: A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

The present study aims primarily at investigating academic collocations included in research abstracts submitted by Egyptian medical authors in Egypt, in a way of evaluating their academic literacy. Retrieved collocations are compared to the Academic Collocation List (Ackermann & Chen, 2013) that comprises 2,468 academic multi-words written by English-speaking natives. The researcher collected 795 medical abstracts from a renowned medical journal in Egypt which were published over six years (2013-2018). The corpus data renders 216,842 words in cross-sectionally annotated file compilation. Results illustrate the non-native speakers’ tendency of including plenty of collocations of statistical connotations rather than those of medical references at the expense of including academic collocational components in other abstract moves. Despite the accepted academic language enclosure, Egyptian authors exclusively use few academic collocations of statistical significance. Thus, that habitual linguistic phenomenon of the non-native writings indicates an epistemological need for learning academic collocations to improve publications’ quality.