Abstract:

Abstract The objective of this paper is to examine and discover the vocabulary knowledge of collocation issues in business students’ academic writing. To achieve the aim, a corpus-based investigation was conducted on essays of 40 tertiary business students to ascertain the extent to which they are exposed to certain key vocabulary of the field and how such words collocate with other words appropriately. Using the British Academic Written English (BAWE) McIsaac version (2019) and concordance (Vocabulary level Text and vocabulary level software, lextutor.ca) as analytic tools to determine the key vocabulary levels of the field, the study qualitatively streamlines the overuse and the underuse of the most common collocations by students who speak English as a Second Language (ESL) in a business tertiary institution, the University of Professional Studies, Accra. The findings show that there are lexical collocation errors such as word choice, business jargon, and contextual errors. The study further reveals that some collocations are overused in student corpora, including increased lexical repetitions and redundancy. We recommend that business tertiary students gain mastery over the vocabulary of their field since it gives them a greater ability to produce high-quality written texts, which aid in text comprehension.

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