The Use of Lexical Bundles by Chinese EFL English-major Undergraduates at Different University Levels: A Corpus-based Study of L2 Learners' Examination Essays

Linguists have been interested in the study of word combinations for more than six decades. The present study has investigated one type of word combination, lexical bundles, which are defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). In order to contribute to some unsolved issues relating to the study of lexical bundles in the literature, the present study has attempted to realize three major research objectives. The first objective is to compare the usage of lexical bundles between the native academic writing and the L2 student writing, trying to provide new evidence to describe the gap between these two different writing genres from a phraseological perspective. The second objective is to try to track down any progress that Chinese EFL English-major university students may have made in the frequency and accuracy use of lexical bundles in writing after two-more-years' intensive learning of English as a L2 at college. The third objective is to analyze the nature of errors that L2 learners have made in their attempts to use lexical bundles at the sentence level, and further explore the impact that longer time of L2 learning may have on learners' frequency of committing different types of errors in writing.;Two groups of 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-word lexical bundles have been investigated in the present study, with each containing 200 distinct lexical bundles. Whereas the first group of lexical bundles (called target bundles) was directly selected from the written Academic Formulas List created by Simpson and Ellis (2010), the second group (called overlapping bundles) was identified from two learner corpora on the basis of a frequency-driven approach. The two learner corpora were made up of written essays collected from the examination papers of two tests (TEM4 vs TEM8) between the year of 2004 and 2006, taken by Chinese EFL English-major students at two different university levels (grade 2 vs grade 4).;The findings of this study reveal that L2 students are still far from mastering those lexical bundles commonly used by native academic writers and have clung on a different group of lexical bundles with an unthinkably high frequency. This study also presents the results of the comparison of students' frequency and accuracy use of bundles across levels and their frequency of making different types of errors across levels. At last, some pedagogical implications of the findings of the present research and suggestions for the future study are introduced and discussed.