Use of Stance Lexical Bundles by Turkish and Japanese EFL Learners and Native English Speakers in Academic Writing

Abstract

Linguists have been interested in the sequences of words that tend to occur for a long time. The present study examines a particular type of recurrent chunks called lexical bundles (LB). LBs are multi-word expressions and an important component of the fluent linguistic production depends on the control of them (Hyland, 2008a). The purpose of this study was to find out the most common stance LBs used in argumentative essays written by native English speakers and Turkish and Japanese EFL learners. It also aimed at finding the structural and functional characteristics of these bundles, and to what extent these structures used by the Turkish and Japanese EFL learners are similar to the ones used by the native speakers. To answer these questions, Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), Japanese International Corpus of Learner English (JPICLE) and Turkish International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE) were used. The structures of the stance LBs were determined by following Biber's (2006) classification and the functions were determined by adapting their classification. The concordancing program WordSmith was used to find and determine the 3-4 word stance LBs. In the statistical analysis, Typetoken ratio and Log Likelihood were used. The results showed that native speakers use lexical bundles least; whereas, Japanese EFL learners use them most frequently. The functions and the structures of LBs vary in each group. Suggestions regarding how to teach these devices in foreign language education were also given.

Lexical Bundles in L1 and L2 English Doctoral Dissertations

“…The results were consistent with Öztürk (2014), who found that LBs were employed more frequently by Turkish researchers against L1. However, Muşlu (2018) found that L1 English corpus was more varied than L2 English corpus in terms of LB usage. We conducted LL statistics to calculate whether the difference of frequency counts in the two corpora was statistically significant.…”

“…It is likely that L2 English writers may not have a clear understanding of the functions of bundles. A study conducted by Muşlu (2018) showed that while there was a heavy reliance on LBs by Japanese and Turkish writers, L1 English writers did not have a tendency towards employing such bundles frequently in their argumentative essays. Karabacak & Qin (2013) compared the argumentative essays written by Turkish, Chinese, and American students with an academic writing corpus taken from the New York Times magazine.…”

“…Corpus linguistics is one of the fields that investigates LBs from a variety of perspectives such as forms, structures and functions (Cortes, 2004;Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004;Hyland, 2008a) historical changes (Hyland & Jiang, 2018); and cultural and disciplinary variations (Lu & Deng, 2019;Muşlu, 2018;Karabacak & Qin, 2013;Dontcheva-Navrotileva, 2012). The results of these studies that are based on the analysis of a large amount of language data have improved our understanding of formulaic sequences.…”

Computerized corpus as a tool for educational technology and learning in the analysis of four-word recurrent expressions

“…Shin (2019) conducted a study between L1 and L2 writers, observing that both groups used similar recurrent expressions such as frequently used verb phrase expressions, stance expressions and prepositional phrase expressions. Muşlu (2018) conducted research on the usage of four-word stance recurrent expressions among Turkish and Japanese EFL learners in comparison with native writers and concluded that L2 writers showed overuse patterns with higher frequency. However, different from the present study, verb phrase expressions were the mostly used expression type.…”

Structure of Lexical Bundles in Journal Scopus One: International Journal of English Studies

“…Language researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the study of the lexical bundle, which has become a challenging research area [11]. They are extended collocations that unpredictably appear more often than would be expected by chance, shaping meanings in certain contexts and improving our perception of text coherence [12]. A lexical bundle is a repeated grouping of three or more words that is typically referred to as a chunk or cluster (Hyland, 2008, p. 5).…”