Lexical bundles in native and non-native academic writing: applying a corpus based study to master two dissertations written by British and Algerian master students
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Date
2023
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University of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
The field of phraseology has proved to be one of the most intriguing language phenomena. Lexical bundles,which is a type of formulaic language, have gained the attention of many corpus researchers for being significant discourse construction devices maintaining both coherence and cohesion. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims at examining the frequency, structure and functions of lexical bundles across two sub-corpora that constitute 60 master dissertations written by British and Algerian students in the fields of: applied linguistics, didactics, TESOL, English language teaching and literature/civilization. The present investigation makes use of a corpus-handling tool AntConc (3.5.9) to carry out the analysis adopting the two main taxonomies of Biber et al.'s (1999) structural model and Biber et al.'s (2004) functional model to compare and contrast the similarities and differences in using four-word lexical bundles implemented in British and Algerian corpus. Informative findings revealed the extent to which both sub-corpora differed in their distribution of lexical bundles. The Algerian students, on the one hand, displayed a very limited number of bundles regarding the structural distribution as well as over relying on repetitive bundles with less strategic use of verb phrase-based bundles which entails poor proficient writing. The native corpus on the other hand, exhibited a wealth range of bundles with more varied structural patterns. In terms of the functional taxonomy, the non-native corpus surprisingly displayed a higher proportion of bundles than the native corpus. In light of these findings, pedagogical implications were highlighted informing the successful introduction of lexical bundles in EAP classrooms as well as suggestions for future research and limitations of the study were both communicated.
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Keywords
Lexical bundles; Phraseological competence; Corpus based investigation; Structural model