The Role of Collocations in Academic Writing

Abstract

Academic writing requires precision, coherence, and a formal tone, all of which are closely linked to the effective use of collocations — fixed or semi-fixed word combinations that signal lexical and stylistic appropriateness. This study investigates the role of collocations in enhancing the clarity, logical structure, and professional tone of academic texts, with a particular focus on Azerbaijani university students learning English for academic purposes. The research identifies common challenges faced by learners, including semantic mismatches, grammatical inaccuracies, native language interference, and cultural variations in English usage. Analysis of discipline-specific texts further demonstrates that humanities, social sciences, economics, and technical fields each employ distinct collocational patterns, highlighting the importance of context-aware instruction. Pedagogical strategies, including corpus-based exercises, contextualized practice, collocation dictionaries, guided rewriting, and peer feedback, are proposed to improve learners’ collocational competence and overall writing proficiency. The study concludes that mastering collocations is essential for producing coherent, credible, and stylistically appropriate academic writing, thereby enabling learners to communicate ideas effectively and align with international scholarly standards.