| Vocabulary knowledge, which has always been an important part of language teaching, is primary to language acquisition. With an increased awareness of the importance of lexis to language acquisition in recent years, the lexical approach proposed by Lewis in1993is quite popular among language teachers and learners. The key principle of lexical approach is that language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar. Unlike the traditional teaching of vocabulary, the lexical approach emphasizes the role of collations, lexical bundles and other multi-word expressions have played a vital role in language acquisition and production. Lexical bundles can be considered as the formulaic units of language. These units are register-specific and perform a variety of discourse functions. Previous studies on lexical bundles have established a frame for the analysis of the structure and discourse functions of various lexical bundles. Lexical bundles with a high frequency in the corpus were categorized according to their syntactical structures and discourse functions by Biber(1999).By comparing the use of lexical bundles in research papers written by Chinese researchers with that of the natives across the engineering and science field, this study investigates the Chinese researchers’ status and level of the use of lexical bundles. For the purposes of this study, two corpora were constructed by the author. One is the Chinese researchers’ English paper corpus (CRC) which is composed of English research papers written by Chinese Researchers, the other is the Native Researchers’ Corpus (NRC) that comprises the English research papers written by Native Researchers. All the texts of the two corpora are published research papers that had been downloaded from the Sciencedirect. These papers cover the three disciplines:engineering, natural science and computer science, and the proportion of each discipline’s papers in the two corpora are about33%. The two corpora have a similar capacity of words:2,560,779words for CRC,2,561,099for NRC. With the application of software Antconc, all the3to5-word lexical bundles were extracted and identified from the two corpora.In this study, firstly, the distribution of these lexical bundles in the two corpora has been analyzed in terms of the types and frequency of occurrence. Secondly, these bundles were categorized according to their different syntactical structures, and lexical bundles with higher frequency in the two corpora were sorted out for further analysis. Lastly, the4-word lexical bundles in the two corpora were classified according to their discourse functions for comparative study. The results of this study shows that:first of all, the Chinese researchers have employed a considerably higher frequency of4-word and5-word lexical bundles than the natives; secondly, compared with the natives,the Chinese researchers are tend to overuse the lexical bundles of "noun-phrase" structure, and the same situation happens to the use of lexical bundles of "can"; lastly, in the study of discourse function of the lexical bundles, it has been found that the native researches used much more types of lexical bundles to express their meaning than the Chinese researchers.The use of lexical bundles is an important indicator of the proficiency level of language learners. It is hoped that the results and findings of this study could bring some insight to the teaching of lexical bundles and provide some useful information about the status of Chinese researchers’use of lexical field in academic writing... |
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