A Study On The Developmental Features Of Lexical Bundles In Chinese English Learners' Academic Writing

Lexical bundles play a crucial role in academic writing.It is documented that they constitute up to half of academic discourse(Erman & Warren,2000).Appropriate and frequent use of lexical bundles helps researchers build disciplinary identities and realize fluent and advanced writing.For L2 learners,the use of academic lexical bundles within the professional field may enhance the persuasion of their academic discourse and is also helpful to improve their academic writing skills.In the studies of EAP,great importance has been increasingly attached to lexical bundles.Most of previous studies have compared the use of lexical bundles across different groups of writers or different registers.However,to date,there is little research on the developmental features of lexical bundles in L2 English learners' academic writing.Analyzing the characteristics of lexical bundles used by learners at different proficiency levels can reveal the developmental law of learners' academic writing,which helps teachers understand learners' language development and properly design EAP teaching.Given this,based on Biber et al.'s(1999)structural taxonomy and Hyland's(2008a,2008b)functional taxonomy of lexical bundles and the like,this study strives to investigate the developmental features of 4-word bundles used by learners at three proficiency levels,BA,MA,and PhD,in academic writing,by reference to the international published research articles.Research questions include: 1)What are the frequency,structural and functional features of 4-word bundles in the corpora of Chinese English learners' writing and international writers' writing in applied linguistics? 2)What are the developmental features of the frequent 4-word bundles in learners' writing? The research procedures mainly include: Identifying the research subjects;Extracting 4-word bundles by WordSmith 5.0 across the four corpora;Analyzing the frequency features,structural and functional features of lexical bundles in the four corpora;Investigating the developmental features of 4-word bundles in learners' academic writing.In this step,the present study first will find out learners' difficulties throughout the comparisons of lexical bundles used by learners and international writers and then explore the developmental features of bundles.The major findings are: 1)Learners at three proficiency levels draw on more bundle tokens and types than international writers,but they use fewer high frequency bundles used by international writers;The high proportions of prepositional phrases and noun phrases occur across the four corpora,which verifies the fact that phrasal bundles are typical of academic writing,but learners employ more structures which belong to spoken registers;Learners draw on higher proportions of topic bundles and lower proportions of framing bundles,while international writers use a lower proportion of topic bundles and higher proportions of framing bundles,procedure bundles and stance bundles,especially framing bundles accounting for two thirds of text-oriented bundles;2)There is evidence that higher proficiency level learners are closer to international writers in the use of bundles;Specifically,learners follow a developmental progression in the use of shared high frequency bundles,phrasal bundles(prepositional and noun phrases),and framing bundles,but show the opposite trend in employing(Pronoun / noun phrase)+Verb phrase fragment,Copula be + noun phrase / adjective phrase,research-oriented bundles and resultative bundles.In academic writing teaching,teachers should effectively design academic writing teaching based on the developmental features.Teachers should also help students raise their consciousness of registers and,meanwhile,encourage them to draw on more framing bundles and exclusive high frequency bundles of international writers.