Lexical Bundles In Academic English:A Corpus-based Study Of L2 Student And Scholar Writing

As essential building blocks of academic writing,the appropriate use of lexical bundles can reflect the fluency in English academic writing.Numerous researchers at home and abroad use the corpus-based approach to investigate the lexical bundles in academic research articles.The studies abroad mainly involve the lexical bundles used by native speakers or L2 learners in different genres and registers.Simultaneously,domestic studies primarily focus on the use of lexical bundles by English major or non-English major undergraduate students in L2 writing.However,few studies cover the lexical bundles in discipline-specific academic articles written by advanced L2 learners across proficiency levels.This paper adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate the frequently occurring four-word lexical bundles in Chinese advanced L2 learners’ academic writing in the discipline of applied linguistics.It aims to explore the distribution frequency,structural and functional characteristics of the lexical bundles used by Chinese scholars and Chinese English major postgraduates,and to discuss the possible reasons for the various uses of target lexical bundles by different groups of writers.Finally,pedagogical implications are provided for the teaching of courses on English for academic purposes.To achieve the above aims,the author first chooses Biber et al.’s structural classification(1999)and Hyland’s functional classification(2008b)as the analytical framework.Then,three corpora are built to identify the characteristics of the lexical bundles used by Chinese advanced L2 learners across different writing proficiency levels.Next,based on the extraction criteria,the author employs the software Antconc 3.3.5 combined with manual filtering to extract the target four-word lexical bundles from the native scholars’ published articles corpus(NSC),Chinese scholars’ published articles corpus(CSC)and Chinese English major postgraduates’ master theses corpus(CMC).Besides,compared with lexical bundles used in the reference corpus respectively,the general features as well as the structural and functional characteristics of the four-word lexical bundles in the two observed corpora are discovered.Meanwhile,Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator is applied to seek the significant statistical differences in frequency distribution of the lexical bundles in different corpora.Finally,the possible reasons for the various uses of four-word lexical bundles by different groups of writers are interpreted.The main conclusions include the following aspects: 1.Advanced L2 learners prefer to use more lexical bundles than native scholars,but the richness of these lexical bundles is less diverse than that of native scholars.There exist some shared lexical bundles within the three corpora,and L2 learners underuse or overuse certain shared lexical bundles in their academic writing.2.The structural and functional types of lexical bundles used by advanced L2 learners across writing proficiency levels display different distribution features in academic writing.3.With the progression of L2 writing proficiency,the differences in the use of lexical bundles are reducing between native scholars and Chinese advanced L2 learners.This study not only helps improve Chinese scholars’ academic writing skills in international academic exchange,but also finds out the problems with the use of lexical bundles by Chinese postgraduates in academic writing.The findings and research perspectives in this study may shed promising light on future studies of lexical bundles.