Shahrjooy Haghighi، Elham

Comparing Writing Patterns of L1 versus L2 English Academic Professionals: Lexical Bundles in Applied Linguistics Journal Articles

AbstractCorpus driven studies on lexical bundles recurrent formulaic sequences haveprovided us with valuable and useful information about different types and functionsof lexical bundles in spoken as well as written registers Recent research hasexamined patterns of the use of lexical bundles Some of the previous studies havefocused on the patterns of use of novice or student writers versus professional writers Others have been focused on a comparison of L1 versus L2 English students However no study has compared the use of lexical bundles by L1 English versus L1 Farsi academic professionals The present study fills this gap by analyzing thestructural and functional features of lexical bundles applied by L1 English and L1 Farsi professional English writing in applied linguistics journals The softwareAntConc 3 4 4 the instrument used in this study identified four word lexicalbundles with the moderately high frequency of at least 40 and a range of occurrencein at least 20 different articles 129 lexical bundles were found in the L2 EnglishCorpus L2 EC and 86 in L1 English corpus L1 EC In order to analyze thestructure of the identified lexical bundles we classified them according to thetaxonomy proposed by Biber Johansson Leech Conrad and Finegan 1999 Thefunctional framework chosen for this study was organized around three broadfunctional categories based on Hyland s functional taxonomy of bundles in academicwriting 2008a 2008b research oriented text oriented and participant oriented with sub categories grouping more specific roles The results showed that both Native English and Iranian writers of English primarilyused phrasal bundles bundles consisting of noun and prepositional phrases ratherthan clausal ones bundles consisting of verbs and clause fragments with nativewriters relying even more heavily on phrasal bundles The two corpora also displayedsimilar proportions of the three main functional categories Research orientedbundles rank as the largest category in both L1 English and L2 English corpora whereas participant oriented bundles constituted the smallest proportion with ahigher percentage of native writers usage of these bundles L1 F professionals usedsignificantly fewer participant oriented bundles than L1 E professionals did Inaddition the relationship between structural types and functional categories showedthat L1 and L2 professionals employed bundles with different structuralcharacteristics serving similar functions Therefore we can conclude that writers whomajored in applied linguistics prove native like use of four word lexical bundles which could be due to their frequent exposure to English language during theiracademic education Keywords Academic articles Applied Linguistics Corpus Function Lexicalbundles Structure vii