English-Medium Instruction (EMI) is attracting attention in the EFL context. The present study investigated verb-noun collocations in research papers written by lower-intermediate level English learners in EMI computer science programs; the goal was to gain understanding of how L2 learners overuse or underuse verb-noun collocations. According to previous studies, even advanced level learners have trouble using collocations as native speakers do in terms of both quality and quantity. In this research, a small-scale corpus was compiled with 132 papers (282,293 words), out of which 347 verb-noun collocations were identified for investigation. The frequency of the collocations was then counted in this learner corpus and in the computer science portion of the Professional English Research Consortium (PERC) Corpus. Results show that learners relied on a select few verb-noun combinations, many of which have exact equivalents in their L1 (e.g., develop + application), thus presenting little risk in their use. On the other hand, a few nouns that are typically used in computer science (e.g., system, program) occurred with more varied verbs in their writing, suggesting the possibility that they had learned novel verb-noun collocations in English implicitly by being exposed to the naturalistic input provided in the EMI programs.