Academic Phraseology: A Key Ingredient in Successful L2 Academic Literacy

Abstract

One of the weaknesses of most current academic word lists is that they fail to do justice to the large stock of multiword units that are typical of academic language. The objective of this chapter is to raise awareness of the importance of phrasal academic vocabulary. After a brief critical survey of three recently compiled phrasal academic lists, the chapter highlights the potential contribution of learner corpus data to identifying the most useful units for teaching purposes. The approach is illustrated with a case study of phrasal metadiscourse based on corpora of novice and expert native writing, and subcorpora from the International Corpus of Learner English representing L2 writers from six different mother tongue backgrounds.