Colligational awareness via concordancing

Preparing students for university level English: how it seemed
As a secondary school teacher in Zambia when I prepared students for university entrance I felt really clear in my own mind what the game was: the game was largely about providing the students with carefully structured activities to develop their grammar, sufficient vocabulary to make a narrative account interesting, a close examination of word families etc. We became particularly adept at transforming sentences from one form to another and the students would practise this last trick until they could perform it as deftly as a conjurer whisking a rabbit out of a hat.

University level English: the reality
I now look back wistfully to those days! I am now a course leader on an MA ELT and part of my role also includes providing language support to students on a range of undergraduate and post-graduate degree courses at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The game is less clear, and the rabbits don’t come out of hats so easily!
One of our most challenging tasks is to help students develop smooth academic prose which is appropriate to their subject. Below is a typical example of prose we would help a student with. The student has tried to make a smooth transition from one topic to another: the transitional sentence is printed in bold.

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