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About Academic Phrasebank
Theoretical Influences
The Academic Phrasebank largely draws on an approach to analysing academic texts originally
pioneered by John Swales in the 1980s. Utilising a genre analysis approach to identify rhetorical
patterns in the introductions to research articles, Swales defined a ‘move’ as a section of text that
serves a specific communicative function (Swales, 1981,1990). This unit of rhetorical analysis is used
as one of the main organising sub-categories of the Academic Phrasebank. Swales not only identified
commonly used moves in article introductions, but he was interested in showing the kind of language
which was used to achieve the communicative purpose of each move. Much of this language was
phraseological in nature.
The resource also draws upon psycholinguistic insights into how language is learnt and produced. It is
now accepted that much of the language we use is phraseological; that it is acquired, stored and
retrieved as pre-formulated constructions (Bolinger, 1976; Pawley and Syder, 1983). These insights
began to be supported empirically in the 1990s as computer technology permitted the identification
of recurrent phraseological patterns in very large corpora of spoken and written English using
specialised software (e.g. Sinclair, 1991). Phrasebank recognises that there is an important
phraseological dimension to academic language and attempts to make examples of this explicit.
Sources of the phrases
The vast majority of phrases in this resource have been taken from authentic academic sources. The
original corpus from which the phrases were ‘harvested’ consisted of 100 postgraduate dissertations
completed at the University of Manchester. However, phrases from academic articles drawn from a
broad spectrum of disciplines have also been, and continue to be, incorporated. In most cases, the
phrases have been simplified and where necessary they have been ‘sifted’ from their particularised
academic content. Where content words have been included for exemplificatory purposes, these are
substitutions of the original words. In selecting a phrase for inclusion into the Academic Phrasebank,
the following questions are asked:
• does it serve a useful communicative purpose in academic text?
• does it contain collocational and/or formulaic elements?
• are the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) generic in nature?
• does the combination ‘sound natural' to a native speaker or writer of English?
When is it acceptable to reuse phrases in academic writing?
In a recent study (Davis and Morley, 2015), 45 academics from two British universities were surveyed
to determine whether reusing phrases was a legitimate activity for academic writers, and if so, what
kind of phrases could be reused. From the survey and later from in-depth interviews, the following
characteristics for acceptability emerged. A reused phrase:
• should not have a unique or original construction;
• should not express a clear point of view of another writer;
• depending on the phrase, may be up to nine words in length; beyond this 'acceptability'
declines;
• may contain up to four generic content words (nouns, verbs or adjectives which are not
bound to a specific topic).
Some of the entries in the Academic Phrasebank, contain specific content words which have been
included for illustrative purposes. These words should be substituted when the phrases are used. In
the phrases below, for example, the content words in bold should be substituted:
