Lexical bundles in ESL science and technology prosspective majors’ writing

Abstract

As the development of corpus linguistic analysis advances, the idea of lexical bundles, recurrent word sequences, has been recognized as a crucial indicator of academic prose and/or conversation register. In tandem with the recent attention to EAP in higher education, the analysis of the L2 writers’ writing within academic disciplines has been one of the focuses of corpus studies. There are however few studies about writings of college students, whose majors are within specific academic disciplines, for example, science and technology. The current study investigates lexical bundle structures and functions distributed in Korean science and engineering college students’ argumentative essays. To investigate the writing characteristics, two different L2 corpora, one contributed by advanced Korean college students and the other by science and engineering college perspective students, are statistically compared. A series of statistical analyses of the lexical bundle frequency confirmed that there is significant difference in the distribution of the lexical bundle structure and function. The results also found that there are major contributors to this difference in terms of structure and function. Implications of the findings and future research suggestions are discussed.