In this article, we present the results of an eight-week in-class intervention, during which binomial expressions comprised of academic vocabulary (results and conclusions, facts and circumstances) were presented to intermediate-level learners of English. Constraints that govern the preferred order of highly fixed binomials were explained as the binomials were introduced. Through a combination of pre- and post- preference tests and a post-course repetition task, we demonstrate that learners were able to learn the preferred order of the targeted binomial expressions, as well as to generalize constraints to new binomials. Data from the repetition task provide evidence that the binomials became part of the learners' lexicon: sentences containing binomials in their preferred order were repeated with ease. Sentences with binomials in their non-preferred order, on the other hand, were either spontaneously reordered or were repeated with disfluencies of various types. Learners again displayed an ability to generalize information about constraints to new binomials. Comparisons with native speakers of English and with corpus data provide further evidence that the learners in this study have become more native-like in their control of binomial expressions following the intervention. We conclude with pedagogical implications.