This article explores how collocation relates to lexical technicality, and how the relationship can be exploited for teaching EAP to second-year engineering students. First, corpus data are presented to show that complex noun phrase formation is a ubiquitous feature of engineering text, and that these phrases (or collocations) are highly discipline-specific in a way that individual words are not. Next it is shown that these collocations as a class may be seen as a kind of threshold to specialised engineering discourse at the undergraduate level, and as such can be used as a basis for an EAP reading programme which is appropriate both in terms of difficulty and specialisation.