A Comparative Analysis of Lexical Bundles Used by Native and Non-native Scholars

Abstract

In the recent years, globalization prepared a ground for English to be the lingua franca of the academia. Thus, most highly prestigious international journals have defined their medium of publications as English. However, even advanced language learners have difficulties in writing their research articles due to the lack of appropriate lexical knowledge and discourse conventions of academia. Considering the fact that the underuse, overuse and misuse of formulaic sequences or lexical bundles are often characterized with non-native writers of English, lexical bundle studies have recently been on the top of the agenda of corpus studies. Although the related literature has represented specific genres or disciplines, no study has scrutinized lexical bundles in the research articles that are written in the educational sciences. Therefore, the current study compared the structural and functional characteristics of the lexical-bundle use in L1 and L2 research articles in English. The results revealed the deviation of the usages of lexical bundles by the non-native speakers of English from the native speaker norms. Furthermore, the results indicated the overuse of clausal or verb-phrase based lexical bundles in the research articles of Turkish scholars while their native counterparts used noun and prepositional phrase-based lexical bundles more than clausal bundles.

Lexical Bundles in Thesis Abstracts by L1 Chinese Learners of English and U.S. Students

“…These results are also similar to those reported by, Hyland (2008a) and Conrad and Biber (2005) for academic writing. But the results in our study are contrary to the finding of Güngör and Uysal (2016) who reported that L1 Turkish writers used more VP-based bundles. These different results might be explained by the use of writing from different L1s, but Chen and Baker (2010) study with L1 Chinese students found that both native and non-native student essays contain many more VP-based bundles than native expert writing does.…”

“…In spite of the assertion made by Adel and Erman (2012) that L1 writers produce a greater number of and more varied set of lexical bundles, there are a number of studies that have found just the opposite. The results of the present study are in accord with Güngör and Uysal (2016), Pan et al (2016) and Hyland (2008a) on the finding that non-native speakers produced more lexical bundles than native speakers did in academic writing. As Paquot and Granger (2012:139) assert, "[L]earners tend to use more lexical bundles in writing when compared to native speakers ....…”

“…Contrary to these similar findings, other research did report conflicting results. When comparing Turkish L1 professionals writing in English with native professional writing, Güngör and Uysal (2016) found that the proportional distribution of research-oriented and text-oriented bundles was a near mirror image between the two groups. The percentage of research-oriented and text-oriented bundles for the Turkish L1 group was 69% and 28% respectively, while for the native English group the percentages were 30% and 66%.…”

“…Hyland (2008a) compared research articles, PhD Dissertations and MA/MSc theses from different disciplines and found less proficient students in constructing their texts rely greatly on lexical bundles. Güngör and Uysal (2016) compared research articles written by native and non-native scholars, which found non-native scholars used a large number of and more varied lexical bundles than the native scholars did. Pan, Reepen, and Biber (2016) conducted the study on lexical bundles of L1 versus L2 English academic professionals in research journals.…”

“…It was found by Shahriari (2017) that there were structural differences among the lexical bundles found in different sections of research articles. The research reported here used only abstracts, in contrast to the research of Güngör and Uysal (2016) who used entire research articles and that of Chen and Baker (2010), who used intact native and non-native student essays. Task demands may have also played a role in the results of the present study.…”