The Use of Corpus and a Collocation Framework in the Comparison of the English Tests of Two Major College Entrance Examinations in Taiwan

Aims and Study Design: This study primarily investigated the English tests of two major college entrance examinations in Taiwan (i.e., the General Scholastic Ability Test and the Advanced Subjects Test) in terms of collocations via the use of corpus and a collocation framework proposed by Benson, Benson, and Ilson [3,8].

Methodology: Two corpora based on the GSAT and the AST (from 2002 to 2011) were built for analysis.

Results and Conclusion: The results obtained through a program called AntConc demonstrated the following similarities. In relation to the most frequent lexical collocations derived from the content words that were among the 200 most frequently used words in both exams, is not (L7) ranked the 1st, and L3 was the most frequently occurring pattern among the seven types put forward by Benson et al. [3,8]. As for the most frequent grammatical collocations generalized from the same content words in the two tests, according to (G5) and such as (G5) were among the top three.