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

Abstract

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.