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

Abstract

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.