The use of academic vocabulary and words collocation in undergraduates' written assignments

• Main Author: Siti Salwani, Saad
• Format: Final Year Project Report
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, UNIMAS 2009
• Subjects: LB Theory and practice of education
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/6970/4/Salwani%28fulltext%29.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/6970/
• Institution: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

This study aims to determine the use of academic words and their collocation in UNIMAS undergraduates’ academic written texts. Coxhead’s (1998) AWL was used in identifying the academic words. There are three objectives of this study which are 1) determine the percentage of AW used in the undergraduates’ academic writing, 2) identify the words that collocate with the AW identified in the undergraduates’ academic writing 3) analyze the type of words (content words or functional) used by science background undergraduate as collocation of the AW identified in the undergraduates’ academic writing. The corpus comprised of academic texts written by EPP students which are reports based on their own mini research. The texts were retrievedfrom the repository and analyzed using a web-based analysis tool ‘VocabProfile’ andconcordance software, TextSTAT. The results showed that the use of academic words among the undergraduates still needs to be improved in order for them to produce a better academic text. However, as L2 learners, their repertoires of word collocation area bit restricted and they tend use the same pattern over and over again to avoid errors. The percentage of functional words used is relatively high compared to content words. It affects the quality of the academic texts by making the text sound less formal. Nevertheless, the undergraduates are aware of some of the stylistic of academic text such as the use of more passive voice compared to active voice.