Phraseological collocations in academic writing: teaching formulaic sequences to improve the quality of scholarly text

Abstract

The article addresses the role of phraseological collocations as a key resource of idiomaticity and conventional adequacy in academic writing in the context of the internationalization of scholarly communication. It is shown that deficiencies in the quality of scholarly text are more often обусловлены not by a lack of terminology or grammatical errors, but by the author’s inability to operate with ready-made lexical blocks that ensure coherence, logical transparency, and recognizability of discourse by the professional community. Academic written discourse is interpreted as a highly standardized system functioning predominantly according to the idiom principle, in which fixed combinations perform metadiscursive and modal functions, provide tools for argumentation, and mark disciplinary affiliation. The theoretical framework draws on the psycholinguistic view of the storage and retrieval of linguistic information in chunks, which reduces cognitive load during text production; in the absence of such a repertoire, writing turns into the construction of utterances “from scratch” and leads to the effect of “non-native” speech and communicative failures, including the phenomenon of phraseological blindness and the illusion of competence when using high-frequency general academic vocabulary. Didactically relevant distinctions between free phrases, collocations, and idioms are discussed, as well as a productive division into general academic formulas for discourse organization and terminological combinations of specific subject fields; the importance of verb–noun constructions in scientific style and the risk of semantic distortion when syntagmatic links are disrupted are emphasized. The necessity of shifting instruction from paradigmatic choice to the mastery of syntagmatic regularities, the development of the skill of “reading as a writer,” and the transfer of collocations into procedural knowledge through recognition, reconstruction of distorted texts, paraphrasing, and error analysis is substantiated. A significant place is given to corpus technologies and data-driven learning, which make it possible to identify frequent patterns, reduce interference, and acquire lexical bundles as the statistical backbone of the academic register. The conclusion is drawn that there is a direct dependence of perceived professionalism and readability of scholarly text on the density and accuracy of collocations, and that institutional integration of academic phraseology into researcher training is necessary.