Use Of Lexical Bundles Research Articles

Structures and functions of lexical bundles in FinTech discourse

Lexical bundles perform a wide range of functions, and present disciplinary variation in written academic prose. However, little is known about the characteristics of lexical bundles used in interdisciplinary domains. Therefore, this study investigates the use of lexical bundles in the field of FinTech, an amalgam of finance and technology, by building a 127 472-word corpus of 114 published research articles related to FinTech. A total of 180 four-word lexical bundles are identified and thereafter analysed in accordance with the taxonomy of structures and functions devised by Biber et al. (1999). The results reveal that (1) the proportion of bundle ending with nouns is twice that of bundles ending with verbs, (2) these identified lexical bundles are dominated by VP-based expressions, and (3) referential bundles account for almost 50% of the 180 instances. The existence of disciplinary variation is once again confirmed in this study, and the discipline specific multi-word combinations may deserve attention in the instruction of EAP writing as they can help students to be more articulate in their academic discourse communities.

Cognizing the Trials of Incorporating Lexical Bundles in English among Balti Speaking Learners: An Inclusive Case Study

The study aims to explore the linguistic trials of Balti-speaking English learners in using the lexical bundles in paragraph writing. Lexical bundles are linguistic terminologies that are run with a proper sequence of morphemes, and indeed, such lexical bundles possess a great role in one’s discourse and fluency. An inclusive case study approach was incorporated, focusing on a targeted team of Balti-speaking English learners enrolled to learn English as a second language in Skardu. The trials and errors of the Balti enrollees were explored in the targeted situation concerning the use of lexical bundles properly in English paragraph writing. The total lexical bundles identified in the targeted documents through textual and structural analyses were based on the fact that 'eleven were used, five were used with errors, and more than twelve were required to be added more appropriately and positively’. To improve the instructional strategies and techniques of language instructors, this study may offer great ideas to handle pedagogical challenges for language instructors in boosting instructional strategies and proficiency.

Disciplinary differences in lexical bundles use: A cautionary tale from methodological variations

Lexical bundles use in academic discourse has been explored across numerous dimensions including discipline, genre, register, student proficiency, and language, among others. These studies have resulted in claims about the nature of these different discourses or their authors, and they have been used in EAP instructional practices. Recent studies on methodological considerations in frequency-based lexical bundles research have pointed to variability in results that stem from changes in criteria used in lexical bundle extraction and corpus composition. Following this, the current study explores the impact of methodological variation in lexical bundle extraction from sets of research articles in Linguistics and Biology, with a focus on the extent of disciplinary variation uncovered in lexical bundles use and function. Experiments with varying frequency thresholds and range specifications as well as corpus composition show that results about lexical bundles use in different disciplinary discourses could be more sharply differentiated when certain variables are used, underscoring the variableness in results and the need for caution in interpreting the findings of lexical bundles research. This paper also evaluates claims made in previous lexical bundles studies using the findings from this study. Finally, previous pedagogical applications of lexical bundles research in academic discourse are discussed.

Analysing the Functions of Lexical Bundles for Teaching Academic Writing to Graduate Students

Academic writing skills contribute greatly in academic performance. One of the key elements of good academic writing is to know the proper use of the strings of the words usually occur together. These words are termed as lexical bundles in corpus linguistics. Some research has been conducted on the use and functions of lexical bundles in spoken and written discourses (Chen & Chen, 2020). However, there is scarce research on the functions of lexical bundles and their use in Pakistani research writing. While drawing on the corpus of 90201 corpora of the 12 Pakistani research articles, we investigated the functions and use of lexical bundles in research papers of Pakistani authors. The list of the lexical bundles by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) was used as a source to interpret the lexical bundles. We found the referential expressions were the highest lexical bundles in research articles of Pakistani authors followed by the expressions of ability and possibility and hedges in the list. Based on these findings, we argue that Pakistani authors are aware about the various types of the lexical bundles and their functions in academic writing. It is suggested that the high-frequency bundles can help the learners to improve the use of modal words used as hedges in academic writing. As per the findings of this study, it is recommended that a large corpus may be built for better results in the future.

Investigating Native and Non-Native Authors' Use of Lexical Bundles in the Literature of ELT Articles Discussion Section

Investigating Native and Non-Native Authors' Use of Lexical Bundles in the Literature of ELT Articles Discussion Section

A comparative study of lexical bundles in linguistics and biology Ph.D. dissertations

Lexical bundles are considered as one of the main rhetorical features in academic genres. The appropriate use of these features adds to the coherence and naturalness of the texts. Recently, genre analysis studies tend to investigate the similarities and differences across different academic disciplines and the effects of the first language of writers on the employment of these linguistic features. There are limited studies, however, in the field with a mere focus on the use of lexical bundles in PhD dissertations and the similarities and differences on the employment of these features among native and non-native English writers. In this regard, the current study, following a comparative corpus-based approach, investigated the use of lexical bundles in English PhD dissertations written by native English-speaking and nonnative Kurdish-speaking writers across the two disciplines of biology and linguistics. All the compiled dissertations were selected from the ones published between 2010 to 2020 in British universities to keep the compiled corpora comparable. In the next phase, the distribution, linguistic structures, and functions of bundles used in introduction and literature review sections of the compiled dissertations were analyzed using WordSmith 6th edition concordancing software. The analysis provides a list of the most frequently used lexical bundles in each scientific field and among the two groups of writers. The structural analysis showed that noun phrases and prepositional phrases were the most frequently used bundles between both groups of writers and of disciplines. It was also found that passive structures were commonly used in biology dissertations. The functional analysis revealed that non-native Kurdish writers tended to use more research-oriented and text-oriented bundles in comparison with their native counterparts. It was suggested that the rhetorical differences and similarities between the two groups of writers and the disciplines could be attributed to the experience or proficiency levels of writers and the conventions, knowledge construction principles and research approaches of each academic discourse community. Pedagogically speaking, it is discussed that teaching discursive features and including language teaching tasks drawn from authentic texts such as text analysis tasks, focused tasks, extended writing tasks enable EAP learners to learn how to employ these linguistic features effectively to improve the flow of information, coherence and fluency in their academic texts.

The Use of Lexical Bundles in English Language Academic Writing among University Learners: A Systematic Literature Review

Lexical bundles have been widely studied in English academic writing, but not as extensive in university learners’ academic writing. This study conducted a systematic review of the literature on lexical bundles in academic writing among university learners from 2017 to 2022 to describe the directions of and limitations of recent studies on how lexical bundles influence the fluency and coherence of academic writing among university learners. The review relied on two major databases, Scopus and Web of Science, and adhered to the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. The study analyzed 28 articles them based on three content-based themes: the research context, the research contents, and the research objectives. Recent research on lexical bundles in academic writing among university students 1) lacks an in-depth analysis of specific functions, such as text-oriented bundles, which predominate and play an important coherence role in more advanced academic writing; 2) addressing the analysis of lexical bundles solely through a phraseological lens fails to account for their genre-specific characteristics. It is crucial to merge insights from both genre and phraseology for a thorough analysis; 3) comparing the academic writing of native English-speaking learners, that of university learners in East Asia and the Middle East are unevenly distributed and limited in scope. There is limited research on academic writing at higher academic levels, university learners in Southeast Asia, and cross-regional comparative studies.

An Analysis of Lexical Bundles in Research Articles: Examples from Natural and Social Sciences

This present research investigates the use of lexical bundles in research articles across different disciplinary areas: natural science and social science. The results showed that there are some differences in the use of lexical bundles between disciplines in the term of frequency, structures, and functions. We found that the frequency of lexical bundles can vary between natural science and social science RA. For example, the lexical bundle "in the learning process" is more common in natural science, while the lexical bundle "on the other hand" is more common in social science. Based on the structural forms, the most common structural form of lexical bundles in natural science RA is verb-based. While the most common structural form of lexical bundles in social science RA is prepositional-based. The contradiction suggests that in terms of structure, there are differences between natural and social science RA writing styles, how the authors establish arguments, and also present results. Meanwhile from the functional classifications, we can conclude that both types of RA have the same order in terms of the frequency of the functional use, with research-oriented bundles being the most frequent. The findings can be used to improve the readability of research articles in one discipline, as well as to help researchers learn the conventions of writing in one discipline.

Structural analysis of lexical bundles in graduate students' research paper abstracts

Lexical bundles, as a recurrent sequence of words, are an important component of both spoken and written academic corpora, used both by professional academics and student writers in order to contribute to better structural organization, efficient communication, and well-established credibility. These expressions are formulaic and highly frequent, with rather clear discourse function and communicative purpose. The most frequently used structures of lexical bundles include NP-based, VP-based, and clause-based bundles. The aim of the paper is to explore the lexical bundles on a learner corpus of 448 abstracts written by non-native English speakers in English during their Masters studies. Structural analysis is performed in order to observe which structures students prefer and utilize while writing abstracts. The corpus was subdivided into two sub-corpora, depending on whether graduate students received any formal instruction on academic writing before publishing their abstracts, to explore whether instructions influence the use of lexical bundles with novice writers. The results offer the most common structures of lexical bundles that graduate students use, as well as the analysis of the types and diversity of lexical bundles used based on whether or not students had academic writing instructions.

An Empirical Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles by Undergraduate Students in Science and Engineering Based on Corpora

An Empirical Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles by Undergraduate Students in Science and Engineering Based on Corpora

The effect of lexical bundles on Iranian EFL learners' argumentative writing performance

The present study examined the effect of raising awareness of lexical bundles on Iranian EFL learners' argumentative writing performance. Therefore, 52 EFL learners at the Talash Language Institute of Jahrom were selected from 73 students by administering the Nelson English Language Test. The selected students were divided into two groups and participated in a writing pretest. The participants in the control group wrote an essay on a topic provided by the teacher in each session without any particular treatment. In contrast, in the experimental group, before the experiment began, the participants were introduced to the use of lexical bundles in the first session, and they followed the procedure used in the control group. After ten writing sessions, a posttest was given to both groups to compare their writing competency after the treatment. The results of the data analysis indicated that raising Iranian EFL learners' awareness of lexical bundles improved their argumentative writing performance significantly. Keywords: Argumentative writing; lexical approach, lexical awareness, lexical bundles, lexical chunks, lexical items, writing

Structures and Functions of Lexical Bundles in Student and Expert Timed Argumentative Writing: A Corpus-Driven Study

Despite rich research into lexical bundle use in documented writing on both expert and novice levels, little is known about this linguistic behaviour in undergraduate timed argumentative writing. This study aimed to narrow this gap by examining two self-compiled corpora: a student corpus composed of 200 timed argumentative essays written by first-year students at a Vietnamese university and an expert corpus comprising 200 essays of the same type produced by IELTS professional writers. Employing existing bundle classification frameworks, it compared structures and functions of four-word bundles across the corpora. Results showed that bundle use was more clausal than phrasal in both corpora, inconsistent with a few previous studies. In addition, the student corpus outnumbered the reference corpus in all broad structural categories, which can be ascribed to the over-manipulation of the “Pronoun/NP + be/VP fragment”, “NP with of-phrase fragment”, and “PP with of-phrase fragment” constructions. Function-wise, the ubiquity of stance and discourse organising bundles in both the corpora reflected the nature of argumentation, on the one hand, and the rigidly structured IELTS writing format, on the other. The study concluded with methodological implications for bundle research and pedagogical implications for L2 writing.

Phraseological Expressions: Gender-Based Corpus Analysis of EFL/ESL Academic Research Articles

Phraseological or multi-word-pattern corpus-driven analysis of language in use has offered significant insights in recent years into how linguistic discourse can vary. This variation has been researched across genres, registers, disciplines, and native or non-native differences. However, very few studies have presented the gender-based analysis of academic research discourse within the EFL/ESL perspective. The current study explored the use of lexical bundles practiced by male and female researchers working in the EFL/ESL academic context within KSA. Corpora comprising almost 300,000 words including 68 research articles, 36 by female and 32 by male researchers were collected and run through Lancsbox 6.0 software package. The analysis was based on the frequency and structural patterns across the selected data. For the critical analysis of structural patterns, the structural taxonomy framework offered by Gezegin-Bal (2109) adapted from Biber et al. (1999) was employed. As established by the findings of the study, prepositional and noun phrases remained overwhelmingly more frequent and common in both corpora. There were no significant gender-based differences in the use of lexical bundles found which reflects that both male and female researchers practiced similar expressions in their use of the English language.

COMPARISON OF LEXICAL BUNDLES IN DISSERTATIONS CATEGORIZED BASED ON ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

The present study aims to compare PhD dissertations, written by Turkish postgraduate students learning English as a foreign language, categorized based on the academic disciplines, in terms of the use of 4-word lexical bundles. To retrieve recurrent lexical bundles and to make their structural and functional analysis, various disciplines are grouped under two separate groups based on the academic fields such as hard and soft sciences. Also, English-major and non-English-major disciplines are compared to each other to see the variation in use of lexical bundles across disciplines. The findings reveal that ELT dissertations, representative of English-major disciplines, have three and four times as many lexical bundles as the dissertations written in the academic fields of soft and hard sciences, respectively. However, the academic fields produce almost the same number of lexical bundle types, suggesting that soft and hard sciences do not show variation in use of 4-word lexical bundles. With regard to the structural analysis of lexical bundles, it is found that lexical bundles most frequently appear in the syntactic categories of noun phrases and prepositional phrases. As for the functional distribution of lexical bundles, the findings indicate that the vast number of lexical bundles in each group function to be referential expressions

Use of lexical bundles in an online comprehensive dictionary of Indonesian (KBBI Daring)

Research on lexical bundles in the last few decades has focused mostly on written registers, especially academic writing. In this study, I investigate the use of lexical bundles in a different genre – dictionaries. As a lexical bundle is formulaic language specific to a particular register, I hypothesize that particular lexical bundles are used in dictionaries. The research focus of this study is the extent to which lexical bundles are used in the online version of the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI Daring; Comprehensive dictionary of Indonesian online), especially in the lemma, definition, and example sections. In addition, the study examines the characteristics of lexical bundles in dictionaries. The approach used is corpus based. As reference bundles, a total of 517 lexical bundles were extracted from the IndonesianWeb Corpus (available from SketchEngine). The bundles were then analyzed for their use in KBBI Daring in terms of their frequency, structure, and function. The results showed that the use of lexical bundles in KBBI Daring was mostly found in the definition section. The bundles found were generally in the form of phrases rather than clauses. In terms of structure, the lexical bundles were dominated by incomplete structures. The bundles, either in the definition or example sections, were mostly in the form of yang-clause fragments, such as yang digunakan untuk “that is used for,” yang terdiri atas “that consists of,” yang terbuat dari “that is made of/from,” yang berasal dari “that comes from,” and yang berhubungan dengan “that relates to.” In terms of function, presenting content is the dominant function in the KBBI, while organizing text is the least prevalent function. In a nutshell, each section in the dictionary, especially in the KBBI, has its own character.

A comparative study of lexical bundles in accepted and rejected applied linguistic research article introductions

Multi-word expressions referred to as lexical bundles are the important ‘discourse building blocks’ to construct and signal fluent writing, particularly in an attempt to produce high-quality research articles that can be accepted by reputable journals. A number of studies have reported the use of lexical bundles in various sections of research articles, including introductions as the holder of research rationale. In spite of that, attention is barely paid to the comparison between accepted and rejected manuscripts. With the intention to fill this gap, this study is aimed at investigating whether the manifestation of lexical bundles will differ between the introduction sections of accepted and rejected research articles in applied linguistics. A total of 15 introductions for each data group were analyzed under the frameworks of lexical bundles structures (Biber et al., 2004) and functions (Hyland, 2008). Findings reveal that noun phrase-based and research-oriented bundles were respectively detected as the most prevalent main structure and function in both accepted and rejected data sets. Closer inspection, however, evinced a greater frequency and richer variety of lexical bundles in accepted introductions. Even so, this study confirmed that the two datasets exhibit different subcategories of lexical bundles in numerous cases. Implicationally, the findings of this study may shed further light on the comprehension of lexical bundles use in preparing related future studies.

Lexical Bundles and Disciplinary Variation in Master Theses

Lexical bundles, as fixed-form recurrent word combinations of multiple words, constitute a significant portion of academic writing and play a pivotal role in producing fluent texts. Extant studies on lexical bundles have documented difficulties that second language learners, and particularly writers experience in producing these bundles in their academic writing. However, despite an extensive existing body of research on the use of lexical bundles in various fields, the use of such linguistic devices across various disciplines, particularly in the Iranian context is an under-researched area. Thus, this study examined the frequency, functions and structure of 4-word lexical bundle use in master theses of native English-speaking writers and Iranian second language (L2) writers across four different disciplines. For this purpose, two corpora, each containing 60 master theses, 120 theses in total, were selected and analyzed following a corpus-based approach. The findings of the study revealed that, overall, Iranian writers incorporated more lexical bundles in their texts than their native English counterparts and that their use varied functionally and structurally across not only native and nonnative corpora but also across disciplines. The study has important implications for Iranian L2 writers of the respective disciplines as well as genre-based instruction in English for both academic and specific
 purposes.

Function and Accuracy of Lexical Bundle Use in English as L3 Learners" Essay Writings: A Learner Corpus-Based Study

This study aims to investigate English features of lexical bundles used by English L3 group of learners, focusing on the function and accuracy. English L3 learners are Chinese Korean ethnic college students who acquired Korean and Chinese before learning English. In order to carry out a comprehensive comparison, Korean L1 and Chinese L1 students are also involved. Thus, EFL leaner corpora of Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC), Chinese Korean English Learner Corpus (CKELC), and Chinese Han English Learner Corpus (CHELC) are examined and compared, with Louvain Corpus of Native English Essay (LOCNESS) as a reference. By comparing those corpora, this study produced the following findings: (1) among the most frequently used bundles, English L3 learners used over 50% of the same bundles as Chinese L1 learners; (2) English L3 learners have the same preference as Korean L1 learners in overusing stance-expression bundles; (3) three groups of EFL learners had a better grammatical correctness than semantic appropriacy in terms of bundle use, but none of them had gained a satisfying performance; (4) with respect to the overall quality of lexical bundles, English L3 learners were the worst among the three EFL learner groups. The results of this study may provide pedagogical implications for EFL teachers to improve learners’ essay writing.

A Contrastive Study on Lexical Bundles in Argumentative Writing by L1-Chinese and L1-English Undergraduates

This study compares the use of lexical bundles in argumentative essays written by L1-Chinese students and L1-English students through a corpus-based approach. The data consist of two corpora: a L1-Chinese corpus with 506 English argumentative essays produced by Chinese undergraduates in disciplines related to science and engineering and a L1-English corpus with 207 argumentative essays written by L1-English undergraduates. The identified lexical bundles were analyzed both structurally and functionally. The findings suggest that L1-Chinese students used significantly more types and tokens of lexical bundle structures than L1-English students, and also employed all the three functional categories of bundles more frequently than L1-English students. In addition, L1-Chinese students’ writing was marked by a higher preference for clause-based bundles, which features the academic writing of lower-proficiency writers, and a wide use of conversational bundles (e.g. a lot of people), which implies their lack of awareness of academic register. The pedagogical implications are then provided regarding lexical bundles for ESL teachers.

LEXICAL BUNDLES ACROSS DISCIPLINES: THE CASE OF RESEARCH ARTICLES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

In order for an academic text to be considered appropriate in the community, it needs to exhibit disciplinary and cultural-based linguistic conventions. With the advances in corpus linguistics, scholars have been able to reveal the employment of these conventions in academic genres, one of which is lexical bundles. Simply defined as recurrent word combinations, lexical bundles reflect prominent functions in academic genres, as they deal with discourse organization, writer-reader negotiation, and stance construction, all of which achieve academic persuasion. Although the previous research has established the importance of lexical bundles, there is much less information about the disciplinary variations in the use of lexical bundles in academic genres. Adopting an automated frequency-driven approach, this research attempted to identify lexical bundles in research articles in the social sciences. Based on the investigation of 4-word lexical bundles in a corpus of research articles written between 2010 and 2019 in applied linguistics, marketing, and political sciences, we observed an impact of disciplinary variation on the overall lexical bundle usages. Concerning the structural and functional distributions of word strings, we observed differences across the disciplines, indicating that the academic communities might have a decisive role in text construction, yielding divergence across the disciplines in the social sciences. Despite differences, we also observed some similarities regarding the structural and functional sequences of bundles across the disciplines, indicating that the social sciences, an umbrella field in academia, has its own merits resulting in convergence across different disciplines.