This workshop is for academic staff members who would like to further advance their research writing skills or are keen to help students become better communicators in their disciplines. The workshop will explore two Cs that can be valuable tools for research writing and other genres of written or spoken communication: Concordancer and Collocations.

“A concordancer is a computer application that enables users to search for language patterns” in a database of written and/or spoken texts (Sun, 2007, p.324). The workshop will show participants the use of a concordancer and how it can help writers in ways that dictionaries cannot.

“Collocation is the co-occurrence of two or more words significantly more often than is found in similar language genres” (Cook, 2012, p.30). What kind of collocational information can be found in a concordancer? How can such information help us as writers? The workshop will examine how proper use of collocations can facilitate expression of meaning. Sixteen most frequent nouns found in research articles across eight disciplines will be shown, and their common collocations will be examined. Participants of this workshop will complete some concordancer exercises together and read excerpts from research articles to see collocations in use.

Please feel free to bring your own tablet or laptop. This workshop is jointly organized by the Community of Practice on Enhancing Students’ English Abilities, the UGC project team Professional Development in Enhancing English Across the Curriculum, and the EDC.