| For more than five decades, linguists have been interested in the study of word combinations, that is, the way words co-occur with other words. The present study investigated a special type of word combination, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of four words that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999), in this case, academic writing. The goal was to improve the understanding of the function of lexical bundles in academic prose by comparing the use of such bundles by published authors in history and biology and by students at three different levels in those disciplines.; The first part of the present study focused on a corpus of published writing from history and biology journals. The most frequent 4-word lexical bundles in that corpus (called target bundles) were identified and classified structurally and functionally. These target bundles created a framework of reference for the further comparison of the use of these bundles between published writing in history and biology and university students' writing in those disciplines. The second part of this study concentrated on students' use of those target bundles. The corpus of students' writing was made up of papers written by students in history and biology courses at three different university levels: undergraduate lower division, undergraduate upper division, and graduate level. Those bundles identified as target bundles were then analyzed in students writing at those three levels in each discipline.; The findings of this study indicate that students at the three university levels rarely used these target bundles in their writing. In addition, when students did use certain bundles, their use did not correspond to the uses of bundles employed by professional authors. This investigation also presents the results of the comparison of students' use of bundles across levels and between disciplines. Finally, various pedagogical implications of the findings of the present project, as well as suggested paths for future research are introduced and discussed. |
