A bibliometric analysis of lexical bundles usage in native and non-native academic writing

Abstract

Over the last few decades, it has become obligatory to publish academic research to survive in academic world. In academic writing skill, lexical bundles (LBs) usage is marked as a master ability to build well-organized paragraphs or essays and are essential instruments to sound more natural and be fluent in English. The current study aimed to search the usage of LBs by non-native and native English academic writers and comparing the profiles of LBs in terms of the function, structure, and frequency. A corpus of 257 articles written by native and non-native academic writers was organized and multi-word LBs were identified using AntConc 3.2.4w. Written texts are collected from Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies (JLLS) by non-native speakers (NNSs) and Linguistics and Education Journal (LINGED) by native speakers (NSs). The findings suggest that non-native writers generally use more lexical bundles but fall into more repetitions. Besides, there are some substantial differences in the frequencies of structural and functional usage of LBs. In structural category, NNSs used Noun Phrase (NP) and Prepositional Phrase (PP)-based LBs and Conjunction at a lower rate, and Verb Phrase (VP) and Clause-based LBs at a higher rate than NSs.  In terms of functional category, research-oriented LBs are more frequently used by NSs while text and stance-oriented LBs are more frequently used by NNSs. As a conclusion, it is stated that, the lexico-grammatical difference between two languages and the NNSs’ tendency to write result-oriented article revealed distinct features of LB usage.