ACADEMIC WRITING REVISITED: A PHRASEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS HIGH-STAKE GENRES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF LEXICAL BUNDLES

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.