A Corpus-based Investigation Of Lexical Bundles In Argumentation By Chinese-English Learners

There is plenty of literature about how lexical bundles influence wiring,but it is largely theoretical.In recent years,some researchers have examined lexical bundles empirically; however research inadequacy lies in the definition and retrieval of lexical bundle as well as selection of corpus.The current study is to provide effective materials to improve writing teaching for teachers and to remedy writing training for students by longitudinally investigating how three-word lexical bundles recur in Chinese English learners' argumentative writing.A corpus-based approach is involved in the current study and the texts analyzed are taken from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners which compromises students' papers from nine universities in China.Two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine essays from the corpus are found available for this study,including 518 timed and 396 untimed essays from the first year students,625 timed and 400 untimed essays from the second year students,510 timed and 550untimed essays from the third year students.The fourth year students' essays are excluded because only sixty texts can be located,which is considered too small a sample to represent the fourth year students' general proficiency.The research findings are shown in grammatical distribution and functional distribution of lexical bundles.The analysis instrument used for the current study is Wordsmith Tools 4.0,the most advanced software to pick out lexical bundles recurring forty times in over ten texts.The findings are shown in two parts:grammatical distribution of lexical bundles and functional distribution of lexical bundles.The grammatical distribution of lexical bundles indicates that,firstly,in Chinese English learners' writing there is a considerable high frequency of three-word lexical bundles,most of which displays an oral style.This is attributed to a lack of register sensitiveness.Secondly,the types of academic lexical bundles are increasing along with the development of students' English proficiency;however,such development is not longitudinal. Moreover,the second year students' writing displays a less strong oral style,and more special expressions are used—a tendency that is believed an effect of the training for TEM 4.In the grammatical distribution,there are two findings:1) the frequency of stance lexical bundles and multi-functional lexical bundles is decreasing.Chinese-English learners prefer to use certain lexical bundles,including some personal bundles with "I","we" and "you",which is believed a strategy that students use to develop an intimacy between the writer and readers;2) the frequency of discourse organizers and referential lexical bundles is increasing with the development of students' general English proficiency;Some connective devices and quantity specification bundles are also found highly frequently used in students' essays,which is the result of writing model and writing prompt.