The Study Of Lexical Bundles In Theses By Masters Of English Education

Lexical bundle is a programmatic sequence stored and used as a whole,and is a basic language unit.Ma(2009)defines lexical bundles as the smallest combination of form and meaning that is composed of multiple words and can be used independently to form sentences or utterances to achieve certain grammatical,discourse,or pragmatic functions.Lexical bundles are particularly important in academic writing,which are mainly reflected in the frequency of use and the function of discourse construction.The previous research on lexical bundles mainly emphasized the differences in usage between different registers,disciplines,and writer groups,and very few papers studied the differences in lexical bundles within the text.In recent years,a large number of masters of education have been cultured in universities,and they are particularly important to the country’s educational work.Therefore,this thesis aims to explore the features of the use of lexical bundles in the theses of masters of English education.The research questions of this thesis are: What is the distributional pattern of the lexical bundles in the theses written by masters of English education? What are the features of the lexical bundles in different functional categories in those theses? This paper adopts the corpus method,and the research tool is Ant Conc.The corpora are 30 papers in Applied Linguistics and TESOL Quarterly in foreign journals and 30 papers for master’s degree in English education in China.The contents in papers from the two magazines and the theses are all relevant to language phenomenon in reality.What’s more,the differentiated use of lexical bundles reflects the features of using lexical bundles in the thesis of the master of English education.The specific operation method is: first retrieve the lexical bundles with research tool,and then identify it according to the frequency and definition.It is unrealistic to analyze the use characteristics from each lexical bundle.Therefore,the next step is to classify and analyze the specific kinds of lexical bundles,and finally conclude the features of the use of lexical bundles for the master of English education.The major findings are summarized as follows:(1)In terms of distributional pattern of lexical bundles,more than half of the lexical bundles in theses belongs to text-oriented bundles,and the next is the research-oriented bundles with participant-oriented bundles less frequent.(2)a.Text-oriented bundles mainly appear in the literature review.Masters of English education tend to use verb-based bundles such as based on the.The bundle which is with the back of the times,with the development of,is used because of the economic development in recent years.Masters are more likely to use the lexical bundle in order to infinitive to express purpose.(2)b.Research-oriented bundles mainly appear in the methodology.Masters use the bundles such as in the experimental class,in the control class carrying specific research background.They also use some bundles which express evaluative function such as one of the most.(2)c.Participant-oriented bundles mainly appear in the conclusion part.Masters use some bundles to stress topic importance such as it has an effect on.Masters tend to use common words which can be seen in the bundles it can be seen that,it can be found that.The results of this research show that there are not only differences in usage of lexical bundles between texts,but also differences within texts.The results of this study are helpful to improve the awareness of using lexical bundles.