Turkish and Native English Academic Writers’ Use Of Lexical Bundles

Yusuf Öztürk, Gül Durmuşoğlu Köse

Abstract


Lexical bundles such as on the other hand and as a result of are extremely common and important in academic discourse. The successful use of lexical bundles typical of a specific academic discipline is important for writers and the absence of such bundles may not sound fluent and native-like. Recent studies (e.g. Adel & Erman, 2012; Chen & Baker, 2010) have revealed that non-native writers produce not only fewer types of lexical bundles, but also less varied ones. Furthermore, they also overuse a restricted number of bundles in their writing. Focusing on this issue, this study aimed to investigate Turkish and native English postgraduate students’ and native scholars’ use of lexical bundles in a specific academic discipline, that is foreign language teaching, in terms of frequency, functions and structures. For this aim, a corpus of 150 texts was collected containing Turkish and native English students’ MA and PhD theses along with native scholars’ published research articles. Four-word lexical bundles were identified using WordSmith Tools 6. The results revealed that Turkish postgraduate students used far more lexical bundles in their texts compared to both native students and scholars. However, there was a redundancy in Turkish students’ texts when the token frequencies were examined, meaning that Turkish students overused most of the lexical bundles. On the other hand, statistical analysis of the bundle lists revealed that Turkish postgraduate students employed different bundles from their native peers and scholars. Finally, the structural and functional categories of the lexical bundles did not show any statistically significant differences across the research sub-corpora.

Keywords


lexical bundles; English academic discourse; Turkish students; native English students; corpus linguistics

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References


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