Lexical bundles in theses, articles and textbooks of applied linguistics: Investigating intradisciplinary uniformity and variation

Abstract

Lexical bundles have been found to be of considerable significance in academic texts. EAP instructors and students alike are thus encouraged to pay careful attention to these multi-word units in their teaching and learning process, respectively. There are several reports as to the discipline sensitivity of lexical bundles, but their variations within the same discipline are underexplored. This paper investigated the forms and functions of 4-word bundles in a 5.7 million word corpus of textbooks, research articles and theses in the discipline of applied linguistics to shed new light on their intradisciplinary variations across the three genres. Our analyses revealed that while bundles vary substantially across different genres in the same discipline, there are still significant commonalities that disciplinary genres share. Our findings are theoretically insightful as they challenge the generality-specificity dichotomy in EAP by showing that neither side can override the other in its importance. The results also have pedagogical implications for EAP practitioners by drawing their attention to the significance of both discipline and genre in teaching lexical bundles.