Core vocabulary items (e.g. thing, way) are often viewed as the enemy of effective academic writing, and style guides and textbooks often advise against using them. However, their bad reputation seems to stem from a single-word perspective that ignores the rich phraseological units that such items tend to figure in. In this study, we focus on the core vocabulary lemma thing to investigate the extent to which a phraseological approach can redeem its reputation. We look at learner essays from ten different first-language backgrounds from the International Corpus of Learner English and compare these to reference corpora from the endpoints of the informal-formal continuum: the Spoken BNC2014 and the Corpus of Academic Journal Articles. The results show that a phraseological approach indeed provides a more nuanced view of the core lemma thing: it is used in a wide variety of multi-word units, many of which common in academic writing. Although some signs of novice production are evident in the learners’ writing, their use is closest to that of the expert academic writers. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of phraseology in vocabulary lists used in teaching and assessment.

核心词汇项目（例如事物，方式）通常被视为有效学术写作的敌人，而风格指南和教科书通常建议不要使用它们。然而，他们的名声不好，似乎从忽略了丰富的语词单位只有一个字的角度来干这样的项目往往图。在这项研究中，我们专注于核心词汇引理的事情进行调查的程度，一个语词的方法可以兑现其声誉。我们从国际学习者英语语料库研究了十种不同的第一语言背景的学习者论文并将它们与非正式正式连续体端点之间的参考语料库进行比较：口语BNC2014和学术期刊文章语料库。结果表明，一个语词的做法的确提供的核心引理更微妙的看法的东西：它是在各种多字的单位，用于其常见于学术写作很多。尽管新手产生的迹象在学习者的写作中很明显，但它们的使用与专业学术作家的使用最接近。本文最后讨论了短语在教学和评估中使用的词汇表中的作用。