Lexical Bundles In The Academic Writing Of First, Second And Foreign Language Students At Tertiary Levels

In recent years, linguists have been interested in the study of lexical bundles. As a special type of frequent word combinations, lexical bundles have attracted more and more attention for they play the significant role in language use and acquisition. Moreover, the use of lexical bundles has been regarded as a marker of speakers’ language proficiency. In the previous studies, researchers always pay more attention to the influence of lexical bundles in language use and acquisition on the level of theoretical study. The empirical studies are rarely used and focus on the role of lexical bundles in language acquisition, the using of lexical bundles in L2speakers’speaking and writing, as well as the relationship between the competence of lexical bundles and language proficiency. Few studies have been designed to compare the different lexical bundles used in different corpora. Even if a few studies compared corpora, they failed to describe a panorama of using lexical bundles in detail.Therefore, the present study, based on a corpus-based approach, is to investigate the use of three-word lexical bundles in the academic writing of L1, L2and FL students at tertiary levels respectively. Different types of the same bundle family are grouped in order to study the features of the different types as a whole. In addition, Biber et al.’s structural classification and Ma’s are combined together in the study. The goal is to summarize the characteristics of lexical bundles in three different groups.Research findings show that:(1) A great quantity of L1lexical bundles has a low-frequency output, even never appear in L2students’ writing. Target bundles with the high-frequency are more inclined to output in L2students’writing, or vice versa:low-frequency bundles are not easy to output, sometimes may not output.(2) For FL students, three-word lexical bundles which are extracted both from L1and L2students’ writing are used with a low-frequency. Target bundles with the high-frequency, identified from either L1or L2students’writing, are more inclined to be used by FL students. In contrast, low-frequency ones are hard to master. In conclusion, FL students have significant differences with L1and L2students respectively in the use of target bundles. L2students also differ from L1students in using lexical bundles significantly.Some pedagogical implications can be given:Both L2and FL students have inadequate acquisition of target bundles, which are used commonly for L1students. L2/FL acquisition of lexical bundles may be affected not only by input frequency of lexical bundles but also by word frequency. Moreover, the findings of the structural output and the list of L1lexical bundles are benefit for teachers to do some training deliberately in teaching.