Using lexical bundles as a tool to analyze definite article use in L2 academic writing: An exploratory study

Abstract

This study investigated the use of definite articles embedded in lexical bundles in L2 writing. The distribution of articles has been traditionally considered to be restricted by the adjoining noun within the noun phrase. However, this traditional account may not apply when definite articles are embedded in lexical bundles (LBs), groups of three or more words that frequently occur in a register, e.g., is one of the, in addition to the, the center of the (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). Furthermore, previous studies have claimed that L2 writers use fewer and less varied LBs than native speakers (e.g., Ädel & Erman, 2012), but little is known about how learners actually use LBs. This study examines a learner corpus to analyze the use of LBs that include definite articles in their internal structure, using an innovative method to identify errors in definite article use. The learner corpus used for this analysis consists of 630,380 words of L2 English academic writing samples produced by Korean college students. First, the corpus was analyzed in search of LBs previously identified in academic genres (Biber et al., 1999; Biber et al., 2004). In a second stage, the search extended to core expressions extracted from each LB (e.g., one of is the core expression in the bundles is one of the and one of the most). The findings suggest that previous reports of learners’ infrequent use of LBs might be partly due to learners’ attempted but incomplete or incorrect LBs and that LB errors often involve definite article use. Finally, the study classified article errors into omission, addition, and misformation (Dulay et al., 1982). The most frequent error was the omission of required definite articles within LBs. The paper includes suggestions for further research and for the use of lexical bundles as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of definite article use.