A Comparative Study On Lexical Bundles In Academic Writings By Chinese Scholars And Native Scholars

Lexical bundles are the building blocks of language, which contribute to language production, fluency and nativelikeness in English speaking and writing. Previous studies at home and abroad mostly focus on the use of lexical bundles by native learners, or on the differences of lexical bundles used by native learners and native scholars, or on those between second language learners and native learners. Few concerns the differences between native scholars and non-native scholars. The present study aimed to find out the similarities and differences of the use of four-word lexical bundles between native scholars and Chinese scholars in the field of applied linguistics. two corpora were set:(NSC) written by native scholars and(NNSC)written by Chinese scholars. The study was conducted to answer the following questions:(1)What are the most frequently used four-word lexical bundles in two corpora? How are the lexical bundles distributed?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the structures and functions of the lexical bundles in the two corpora?All four-word lexical bundles in two corpora were classified and described, and compared both structurally and functionally. This study makes an exploration of similarities and differences in these two corpora from the perspectives of structure and function of 4-word lexical bundles. The most frequently used top 20 bundles in both corpora were analyzed in detail. corpus-based approach was adopted to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis as regards the similarities and differences between the four-word lexical bundles used by native scholars and by Chinese scholars.The findings are:(1) Chinese scholars use fewer lexical bundles than native scholars.(2) the most frequently used top 20 four-word lexical bundles both differ in frequency and type, Chinese scholars overuse most of the lexical bundles shared by both corpora.(3)Structurally, most of the four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora are noun phrase fragments and prepositional phrase fragments, but the percentages of each of the phrasal bundles and clausal bundles are different. Functionally, Chinese scholars prefer research-oriented bundles while native scholars prefer text-oriented bundles, and the percentages of each major category and sub-category are also different. With these findings, the present study extends lexical bundle researches to academic discourse, which can provide guidance and reference for EAP(English for academic purposes) teaching and possible new directions for future lexical bundle research are suggested.