2013 IJRSLL – Volume 2 Issue 3
Author/s:
Shahriari Ahmadi, Hesamoddin*
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran (hesamshahriari@yahoo.com)
Ghonsooly, Behzad
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran (ghonsooly@yahoo.com)
Hosseini Fatemi, Azar
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran (azar.h.fatemi@gmail.com)
Abstract:
Considering the role of academic writing in the dissemination of research findings among members of scientific communities, efforts have been made by language specialists to achieve a more detailed understanding of this register, with hopes that the derived features could then be used to teach researchers, writing in a second/foreign language, to more effectively communicate the results of their studies. This study sets out to achieve a similar goal through the analysis of research article introductions in terms of the frequency and function of their lexical bundles. To this end, a corpus of 200 research article introductions by published authors in the field of Applied Linguistics was compared to a similar corpus by Iranian, non-native writers of the same field. The findings reveal that Iranian authors use more 4-word lexical bundles in their writing compared to their native-speaker counterparts. Syntactic and functional differences between the two corpora are introduced and implications for academic writing instructors are discussed in detail.
Keywords: lexical bundles; multiword expressions; corpus linguistics; research articles
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrsll.2012.158
*Corresponding Author