A Corpus-Based Study:Lexical Bundles In The Academic Writing Of Chinese Graduate Students And Professional Writers

This is a corpus-based study investigating into the use of lexical bundles in the academic writing of Chinese graduate students, using a both qualitative and quantitative method. Two similar-size corpora about language teaching and acquisition were built in this study to compare the use of lexical bundles in academic writing by Chinese learner writers’ writing with that by professional writers. One is called the MAE Corpus, which contains70masters’ theses in English by Chinese students. The other is called the JA Corpus, which is made up of145English journal articles. First, the overall features were discussed. Academic writing of Chinese graduate students tended to use more lexical bundles than professional writer, with larger lexical bundle diversity. There a number of lexical bundles that co-exist in both corpora, which means that Chinese graduate students possess certain amount of knowledge of lexical bundle use. However, their knowledge was not sufficient as the example of "in the process of showed that many of the lexical bundles were used redundantly. To further identify the difference in use of lexical bundles, I classified the four-word both structurally and functionally based on Biber’s (1999:1014-1024) and Hyland’s (2008a,2008b) taxonomies. Structural classification shows that Chinese graduate students tend to employ less prepositional phrases with of-phrase fragment and noun phrases with of-phrase fragment compared with professional writers, while using more other prepositional phrases and noun phrases. This difference in structural distribution indicated that Chinese graduate students tended to pay deficient attention to logic relationship between elements in their theses and over insist on subjectivity of the thesis. On the other hand, functional classification showed that Chinese graduate students over relied on research-oriented lexical bundles while tended to neglect the functions of text-oriented lexical bundles and participant-oriented bundles. The distribution added "a strong real-world, research-focused sense" to Chinese graduate students’ theses and suggested that they wanted to show both author anonymity and their familiarity with the subject content. In addition, the underuse of text-oriented lexical bundles reflected that Chinese graduate students should improve their knowledge of organization of thesis.