A Comparative Study Of Lexical Bundles Used By L2-English Chinese And L1-English Students In The Conclusion Section Of Dissertation Writing

Since the idea of genre was first proposed by Swales(1981),various studies have been carried out to look into the discoursal structure as well as the linguistic features of research articles(RAs)with little attention paid to academic theses.However,thesis writing is the most challenging writing task for most student-writers.In order to help students have a better grasp of how to construct academic theses,many researchers have shifted their research from RAs to academic theses.With the development of genre analysis,in addition to analyzing discoural structure on a macro-level and linguistic features on a micro-level,Cortes(2004)points out that in order to help students better construct discourse,it is essential to combine moves and steps with linguistic features,but this kind of research still mainly focuses on RAs.With the increasing need to relate linguistic features to moves and steps and the urgent demand on shifting attention to PhD dissertation writing,this paper combines the moves in the Conclusion section of PhD dissertation with the linguistic feature—lexical bundle and discusses the characteristics of lexical bundles frequently used in each move.In this study,30 PhD dissertations written by L2-English Chinese students and 30 PhD dissertations written by L1-English students are selected from CNKI and ProQuest respectively to constitute the corpora for analysis.Before analyzing the move structure of the Conclusion section,this study checks the status of the Conclusion section first to see if this section keeps a separate status in dissertation.After the move structure is analyzed,lexical bundles frequently used in each move in the Conclusion section are identified.In order to better show the characteristics of lexical bundles identified in each move,comparisons are also made between the structural and functional use of lexical bundles by L2-English Chinese and LI-English students.The findings indicate that the Conclusion section usually has a separate status in dissertations written by Chinese students,while some native students still take it as a part of Discussion section.Regardless of the fact that each move occurs with different frequency in dissertations written by Chinese students and native-speaker students,the Conclusion section of PhD dissertations in applied linguistics mainly covers 7 moves:Introductory restatement,Summary of findings of the research,Implications,Significance of the research,Limitations of the research,Recommendations for future research,and Concluding restatement.In terms of lexical bundles,generally,Chinese students use more lexical bundles than native-speaker students in the Conclusion section.Similarities,as well as differences,are found in the structural and functional use of lexical bundles between Chinese and native-speaker students.This study not only presents the lexical bundles frequently used in each move in the Conclusion section of PhD dissertations,but also compares the structural and functional use of lexical bundles between L2-English Chinese students and L1-English students,which not only helps ESL learners have a better understanding of generic structure and lexical bundle use in the Conclusion section of PhD dissertations,but also provides some pedagogical implications for ESL writing.