The Structure and Function of Lexical Bundles in Communicative Saudi High School EFL Textbooks

Abstract

Current English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks have largely adopted the communicative approach by using authentic materials to foster EFL students’ communicative competence. However, the communicative status of Saudi high school English textbooks has been underexplored. One way to assess the authenticity of Saudi EFL textbooks is by considering their use of a frequent linguistic item known as lexical bundles. Thus, the present study investigated whether the lexical bundles in communicative Saudi high school textbooks are representative of conversational English. This comparative corpus study used a lexical bundle approach to compare the ten most frequent lexical bundles in the textbooks to those in an English reference corpus. Results show that three and four-word lexical bundles are less frequent in the textbooks compared to the reference corpus and that there is considerable variation in the structural and functional patterns of the bundles in the two corpora. Pedagogical implications are discussed in light of the findings.