The Future of Education

The study examines the use of Business English collocations in written papers by ESL higher school students of advanced level. The aim of the study is to establish a correlation between the frequency and the quality of the use of different types of collocations and a range of significant variables including the linguistic background of students, gender, language proficiency level, discipline of studies and several others. The data will be collected using a survey method and analyzing the academic papers of the respondents.

At the first stage the analysis is conducted using the Russian Error-Annotated Learner English Corpus (REALEC) POS-tagging scheme in order to filter and sort business collocations by their structural type. We have considered collocations of three types: verb+noun, adjective+noun and noun+noun to identify the frequency of use of each type. With the help of mathematical and statistical methods of analyzing the data received at previous stages it is concluded which factors at play are the most influential and which of them contribute most to the advanced use of collocations by ESL students. The methodology of the study includes a multiple regression and factor analysis as well as an interpretation of the outcomes. The relevance of the study consists in the practical application of the research results in the educational process in order to improve the methods of teaching collocations.