Use of Stance Lexical Bundles by Turkish and Japanese EFL Learners and Native English Speakers in Academic Writing

Abstract

Linguists have been interested in the sequences of words that tend to occur for a long time. The present study examines a particular type of recurrent chunks called lexical bundles (LB). LBs are multi-word expressions and an important component of the fluent linguistic production depends on the control of them (Hyland, 2008a). The purpose of this study was to find out the most common stance LBs used in argumentative essays written by native English speakers and Turkish and Japanese EFL learners. It also aimed at finding the structural and functional characteristics of these bundles, and to what extent these structures used by the Turkish and Japanese EFL learners are similar to the ones used by the native speakers. To answer these questions, Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), Japanese International Corpus of Learner English (JPICLE) and Turkish International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE) were used. The structures of the stance LBs were determined by following Biber’s (2006) classification and the functions were determined by adapting their classification. The concordancing program WordSmith was used to find and determine the 3-4 word stance LBs. In the statistical analysis, Type-token ratio and Log Likelihood were used. The results showed that native speakers use lexical bundles least; whereas, Japanese EFL learners use them most frequently. The functions and the structures of LBs vary in each group. Suggestions regarding how to teach these devices in foreign language education were also given.