Lithuanian academic phrase usage in bachelor’s theses of five main fields of science

Abstract

The aim of this study is to discuss Lithuanian academic phrase usage in students’ writings of five main fields of science: Biomedical sciences (B000), Physical sciences (P000), Human sciences (H000), Social sciences (S000), and Technology-engineering (T000). The research is based on material collected from data corpus that was constructed for the project “Phraseme research in student writing and interactive list of phrasemes”. Lithuanian researchers have so far focused on automatic identification of Lithuanian multi-word expressions, as well as on preparation of general corpora or databases and lists of collocations. While English- and German-speaking students can use specific lists of academic words, phrases, and online academic phrase banks, as well as training (learning) platforms that help to write research articles, to date, just one similar interactive tool has been established in Lithuania. The study will focus on discussing the most frequently used academic words and phrases and their types. Firstly, phrases will be classified according to the structural parts of the research text: introduction, sources of delivery, description of methodology, presentation of results, discussion, and conclusions (cf. Swales 1990, 2004). Next, the research relies on Hyland, 2008a classification of functions of lexical bundles, with the focus on research-oriented lexical bundles. At the end of the research, a variety of phrases will be analysed.