چکیده:
Lexical bundles are frequent word combinations that commonly appear in different registers. They have been the subject of much research in the area of corpus linguistics during the last decade. While most previous studies of bundles have mainly focused on variations in the use of these word combinations across different registers and a number of disciplines, not much research has been done to explore some high-stakes written academic genres of one single disciplinary area. This more qualitative study aimed at finding the way in which target bundles in the discipline of applied linguistics, as identified in research articles, were used by two groups of EFL postgraduate students (master-level and doctoral students) as novice discourse community members in the same discipline. Surprisingly enough, the study, contrary to some findings of the previous research, found that in many cases, postgraduate students were able to use target bundles as published writers did. The study, therefore, revealed little if any difference between the three groups of writers in their actual use of lexical bundles. Notwithstanding this, there were some remarkable discrepancies between the three groups with regard to some structural and functional classes of bundles.
خلاصه ماشینی:
While most previous studies of bundles have mainly focused on variations in the use of these word combinations across different registers and a number of disciplines, not much research has been done to explore some high-stakes written academic genres of one single disciplinary area.
However, it is not only their pervasive presence in the language that has made bundles a topic of high interest, especially in recent corpus-based studies, but rather it is often their noteworthy functional contribution to the development, coherence and organization of different texts, either spoken or written, (Biber et al, 2004; Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, 2008b) that has attracted the researchers in the field.
The review of the above research shows that there have been very few studies focusing on the study of bundles within one single disciplinary area especially with an aim to describe and explain possible differences and/or similarities between published experts and novice postgraduates in the use of these word combinations in their respective high-stakes genres: research articles, doctoral dissertations, and master theses.
Making an attempt to test this hypothesis and following on several studies which have compared the use of different linguistic features in the written production of published authors and university students (Conrad, 1996; Hewings & Hewings, 2002), the present research employed a corpus-based approach to examine lexical bundles in published and student academic writing in applied linguistics.
More specifically, this study chose to first identify lexical bundles in research articles, known as target bundles (Cortes, 2002, 2004), and then investigate the frequency, form, and function of such bundles in the two postgraduate genres of applied linguistics: master theses and doctoral dissertations.