Using Collocations to Enhance Academic Writing: A Survey Study at Van Lang University

Abstract

As a formulaic language, collocations have brought benefits and challenges to EFL learners' academic writing. These chunks' functions in academic writing need examining for a long time. Under certain constraints of the research setting, the current study explored both students' and lecturers' standpoints on using collocations to enhance academic writing. As one of quite a few studies in the Vietnamese context, the research included 47 English-major juniors and 5 English lecturers at Van Lang University, Hochiminh City, in the first semester of 2020-2021 academic year. Two research instruments were employed: the online questionnaire (to students) and the email interview (to lecturers). Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics by SPSS (version 20) were utilized to describe both stakeholders' insights into the research problem. Major findings illustrated that the students' demotivation of extensive reading and collocational practice were additional barriers to the collocational acquisition. Learners' and teachers' perspectives on the benefits of collocations in academic writing are congruent; however, the ignorance of collocations in language instruction and ineffective learning strategies might cause many constraints. The study results might provoke questions of whether using corpus-based tools (instructed or non-instructed) could have any impact on students' collocation use in their academic writing. Thus, the results might draw attention to the need of teachers' and learners' reflection and recommends a few ideas for future research.