A phraseological exploration of university lectures through phrase frames

Abstract

While a recent trend in corpus-based analysis on phraseology has increasingly emphasized the role of phrase frames (p-frames) in developing learner awareness and literacy of academic genres, especially academic writing, p-frames in academic speech still remain understudied. To explore the phraseological profile of academic speech and extend the current efforts in creating lists of academic expressions for pedagogical use, this study aims to derive a list of cross-disciplinary p-frames for university lectures. A combination of corpus statistics along with manual filtering and instructor evaluation results in 117 five-word p-frames and 29 6-word p-frames, with a great majority of them (93.2%) being considered potentially pedagogically useful. Structural and functional analyses of the resulting p-frames further reveal genre-specific features, highlighting phraseological differences between academic speech and writing. The findings of this study can provide implications for research on academic formulaic language and the teaching and learning of English for academic purposes (EAP).