Key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education

Abstract

Recent scholarship on phraseology in academic writing has concentrated on phrase frames (p-frames), which are recurrent sequences of identical words with a variable slot. The present study purports to identify the key phrase frames in the discussion section of research articles of higher education. The corpus used in this research consists of the discussions of research articles published from 2013 to 2018 in thirteen leading journals in the field of higher education. The p-frames extracted by KfNgram were compared with the British Academic Written English Corpus11The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (www.coventry.ac.uk/bawe) was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes, under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800). to find those phraseological items specific to the discipline of higher education, resulting in a list of 58 four-word and 40 five-word p-frames that are key to the research article discussion in this field. Moreover, the majority of these frames were found to be non-verb content word phrases, and referential expressions in terms of discourse function. Pedagogical implications for discipline-specific writing programs are offered.