Abstract
The issue of specificity in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) settings has always challenged linguists and instructors in the field to take a stance on how language should be perceived, that is whether language forms and features are transferable across different academic disciplines or are specific to particular disciplines. This study intends to take this debate a step further by employing a corpus-driven method in identifying a type of phraseological sequence, namely lexical bundles in a corpus of journal articles in the field of International Business Management (IBM). The lexical bundles were compared with those compiled by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) in their study of Academic Formulas List (AFL) to determine the specificity of the lexical bundles identified in this study. Following frequency-based approach, the corpus tool, Collocate 1.0 was used to extract three- to five-word sequences. These word sequences were manually filtered to exclude irrelevant and meaningless combinations. The qualified lexical bundles were compiled and compared with lexical bundles in AFL (Simpson-Vlach and Ellis 2010) using log-likelihood test. The findings show that three-word lexical bundles are the most common types of lexical bundles in IBM corpus. The comparison reveals that lexical bundles in IBM corpus are relatively specific as compared with lexical bundles in AFL. A discipline-specific approach to the teaching and learning of lexical bundles in EAP settings is therefore advocated to enhance EAP syllabuses and instruction. Keywords: EAP; phraseological sequences; lexical bundles; frequency-based; discipline-specific
Highlights
Studies on phraseology in various genres and disciplines have been flourishing in recent years with the advancement of computer-mediated research methodology
These 1055 bundles amount to a total of 48220 individual cases, which make up 2.19% of one million words in the corpus of this study
The lexical bundle list is largely composed of three-word strings, which account for 85% or 898 of the 1055 target bundles
Summary
Studies on phraseology in various genres and disciplines have been flourishing in recent years with the advancement of computer-mediated research methodology. Previous studies on phraseology have shown that the knowledge of phraseology is essential in ensuring fluency and natural use of language (Pawley & Syder 1983, Sinclair 1991, Hill 2000, Hyland 2012, Ang et al 2017). The appropriate use of phraseological sequences is a determining factor in warranting pragmatic competence, given the prevalence of these recurring sequences in both spoken and written discourse (Paquot & Granger 2012). The prevalence of phraseological sequences in discourse indicates that meaning creation and understanding is essentially dependent upon stocks of the phraseological sequences in language users’ lexicon.
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