Investigating Native and Non-Native Authors' Use of Lexical Bundles in the Literature of ELT Articles Discussion Section

Abstract

Lexical bundles in ELT articles are considered as the bases of coherent contexts. In line with some previous studies, the present article aimed to compare native and nonnative ELT articles in terms of four-word lexical bundles. In so doing, a corpus including 200 ELT articles were chosen from 12 academic journals. First, all lexical bundles were identified and classified structurally and functionally based on Biber et al. (1999) taxonomy and Hyland (2008a, 2008b functional category of lexical bundles in academic text respectively. To analyze the corpora, Antconc software (version 3.3.2), proposed by Anthony (2012), was used. The results revealed that authors of both corpora made use of various types of four-word lexical bundles; however, there were significant differences between native and nonnative articles in terms of their use of four-word lexical bundles; Iranian authors used theses lexical bundles almost twice more than native authors. In terms of functions, it was found that text-oriented bundles were the most frequent lexical combinations used by native and nonnative authors. Considering the results and previous studies, it is inferred that employing different lexical bundles to show the significant parts of academic research articles can help to effective information delivery in academic writing.