scholarly journals Hard or Soft Science? Conceptualizing Educational Technology through a Lexical Bundle Analytical Approach

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Chih-Wei Kuo

An ongoing discussion on the disciplinary nature of educational technology has been taking place for years. Some view this discipline from the perspective of instructional design and implementation, whereas others conceptualize it from the perspective of media, tool, and system. This study examined educational technology from the perspective of language use by empirically investigating a special sequence of words, referred to as lexical bundles, in educational technology research articles. It aims to capture the distinctive nature of educational technology as soft technology and examine possible associations of educational technology with relevant disciplines. Employing a text analysis tool of AntConc 3.4.3, the researcher compiled a corpus encompassing 323 research articles from six journals with approximately 2.1 million words to identify lexical bundles. All identified bundles were analyzed and further compared with past relevant studies based on the number of different bundles, the content of bundles, and the grammatical structure of bundles. It was found that educational technology as an inter-discipline resembles much more soft science fields in terms of the content and structural categories of bundles. This study not only contributes to a better conceptual understanding of the nature of educational technology but offers a pedagogically beneficial bundle list for informing academic writing instruction in this field.

Author(s):  
Violeta Damchevska

This paper looks into the structure of four-word lexical bundles in scientific articles in English in economics journals, written by Macedonian scholars. It adopts the lexical bundle method, which requires multi-word sequences to be identified in an electronic corpus, based on their frequency and fixedness. For the purpose of the research, a corpus of economics research articles was compiled, based on which lexical bundles were identified, and compared with bundles found in four other disciplines. The results suggest that academic writers in the discipline of economics rely on the use of lexical bundles, and share bundles found among the twenty most frequent in the academic prose. The bundles identified in published economic writing show similarity with the bundles found in applied linguistics and business studies, and differences with the ones used in biology and electrical engineering. The grammatical structure of the bundles was found to be clausal, with the majority of bundles containing noun phrases and prepositional phrases. The findings from this research have some implications for EAP curricula developers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-293
Author(s):  
Isaac Nuokyaa-Ire Mwinlaaru

Abstract This study explores the benefits of a synergy between ESP research on genre and theoretical dimensions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It models genre on SFL dimensions and employs this model to analyse 200 biodata written by Applied Linguistics scholars, 100 each from research articles and seminar posters. Data were analysed from contextual, logico-semantic and lexicogrammatical perspectives. The findings reveal five generic stages in biodata. The frequency distribution of these stages and the phases that realise them shows variation between research article bios and seminar bios. The most frequent logico-semantic (or rhetorical) relations identified among stages and phases are of the expansion type, namely addition and elaboration, Further, collocational frameworks are used in organising some generic phases into waves of meaning and in construing different identities. Finally, evaluative resources, in the form of lexical bundles, modification and circumstantial elements in the clause, are employed by writers to boost their professional achievements and promote themselves. These findings contribute to theoretical discussions on genre and the scholarship on the interface between identity construction and academic writing, and also motivate further research.


Author(s):  
Abdelghani Babori ◽  
Abdelkarim Zaid ◽  
Hicham Fihri Fassi

Over the last decade, several studies have focused on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The synthesis presented here concentrates on these studies and aims to examine the place held by content in these studies, especially those produced between 2012 and 2018: sixty-five peer reviewed papers are identified through five major educational technology research journals. The analysis revealed that these research articles covered a wide diversity of content. Content was mainly defined in terms of objectives of MOOCs, prerequisites required for participation in the MOOC, types of learning scenarios, and, though rarely, through the strategies used to convey content. In addition, empirical studies adopted a variety of conceptual frameworks which focused mainly on learning strategies without relating to the content in question. Finally, content was seldom considered as a research object. These results can provide MOOC researchers and instructors with insights for the study and design of MOOCs by taking into account the specificity of their content.  


Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-263
Author(s):  
Duygu Candarli ◽  
Steven Jones

Lexical bundles are pervasive in English academic writing; however, little scholarly attention has been paid to how quantitative and qualitative research paradigms influence the use of lexical bundles in research articles. In order to investigate this, we created two equal-size corpora of research articles in the discipline of education. We examined four-word lexical bundles in terms of their structural characteristics and discourse functions in the quantitative and qualitative research articles published in international English-medium journals. We attribute intra-disciplinary variations in the use of lexical bundles to the knowledge-making practices that are specific to quantitative and qualitative research articles. This paper provides further evidence that the research article is not a unitary construct. The results have implications for academic writing, and corpus building and design in academic discourse. One of the key implications of this study is that L2 novice writers need to take into account the influences of research paradigms on the use of lexical bundles when writing research articles for English-medium journals in the discipline of education.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Basim Alamri

The present study implemented a genre-based approach to analyze the rhetorical structure of English language research articles (RAs): specifically, the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion-Conclusion (I-M-R-D-C) sections. Next, lexical bundles (LBs) associated with patterns of moves were identified by applying a corpus-driven approach. The study analyzed two corpora of 30 RAs purposely selected from 16 peer-reviewed journals of applied linguistics published in Saudi Arabia and internationally during the years of 2011-2016. First, a genre-based approach was used to identify the move structures of RAs through analyzing different RA sections by different models. Next, lexical bundles associated with each identified move in each IMRDC section were analyzed using a corpus-driven approach, based on structural and functional taxonomies. The study findings showed that both corpora share similarities and differences related to rhetorical structures and lexical bundles. These findings have pedagogical implications for novice writers, graduate students, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction, including raising awareness of rhetorical structures and LBs in academic writing for publication, which could help produce more successful publishable research articles.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 585
Author(s):  
Amare Tesfie Birhan

Lexical bundles are two or more string of words that co-occur frequently in a corpus. Hence, this corpus-based research design study examines the effects of lexical bundles on English as a foreign language learner’s abstract genre academic writing skills, and it also investigates students’ perception towards lexical bundles instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Hence, frequent lexical bundles were selected from 70 computer science articles. These articles were selected from 7 journals that were published in reputable, indexed, and through representative criteria. Accordingly, sixteen frequent lexical bundles were selected through corpus analysis software (Laurence Anthony’s Antconc software) for the purpose of classroom instruction. The bundles are intended to help computer science students to develop their abstract genre academic writing skills. Students have instructed their academic writing through corpus informed instruction for two months, and the data were gathered through pre and post-tests and questionnaire. The findings indicated that lexical bundles have a positive effect on students’ academic writing skills, particularly abstract genre writing. Besides, the students have a positive perception of the lexical bundle and the instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Finally, this research calls attention to discipline-oriented lexical bundles since they are crucial for academic writing. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatih Gungor ◽  
Hacer Hande Uysal

<p>In the recent years, globalization prepared a ground for English to be the lingua franca of the academia. Thus, most highly prestigious international journals have defined their medium of publications as English. However, even advanced language learners have difficulties in writing their research articles due to the lack of appropriate lexical knowledge and discourse conventions of academia. Considering the fact that the underuse, overuse and misuse of formulaic sequences or lexical bundles are often characterized with non-native writers of English, lexical bundle studies have recently been on the top of the agenda of corpus studies. Although the related literature has represented specific genres or disciplines, no study has scrutinized lexical bundles in the research articles that are written in the educational sciences. Therefore, the current study compared the structural and functional characteristics of the lexical-bundle use in L1 and L2 research articles in English. The results revealed the deviation of the usages of lexical bundles by the non-native speakers of English from the native speaker norms. Furthermore, the results indicated the overuse of clausal or verb-phrase based lexical bundles in the research articles of Turkish scholars while their native counterparts used noun and prepositional phrase-based lexical bundles more than clausal bundles.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serpil Ucar

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations –lexical bundles- play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers’ use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical bundles (Bal, 2010; Karabacak & Qin, 2013, Öztürk, 2014). Therefore, this current research was conducted in order to investigate the most frequently used lexical bundles in the academically published articles of Turkish non-native and native speakers of English and to investigate whether there was a significant difference between native and non-native scholars with respect to the frequency, structures and functions of English language lexical bundles. The data were collected from two corpora; 15 scientific articles of native speakers and 15 scientific articles of Turkish advanced writers. The investigation included a quantitative analysis of the use of three-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions and structures they serve. To be more conservative, three-word lexical bundles which occur 40 times per million words and appear in 5 different texts were described a lexical bundle in this current research. The findings revealed that Turkish non-native writers showed underuse and less variation in the use of lexical bundles in their academic prose compared to native speakers.


Author(s):  
Purificación Sánchez

On the basis of previous lexical bundle studies, this paper examines the forms, structures and functions of 4-word bundles in a corpus of textbooks and a corpus of research articles in Biology. The study includes the main biological disciplines and focuses on three major features: the overall distribution of bundles, their typical structures, and their functions in discourse in Biology. The findings support the idea that lexical bundles are a basic linguistic construct with important functions for the construction of discourse in this area. Concluding discussion highlights the pedagogical implications of using research journals and/or textbooks to teach English to biologists in a second language context. Furthermore, the importance of explicit instruction in these word combinations in courses on English for Biologists is emphasized.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-303
Author(s):  
Adi Budiwiyanto ◽  
Totok Suhardijanto

Recent studies show that lexical bundles in English are pervasively found in academic discourse. In addition, the characteristics of lexical bundles found vary and differ across registers and genres. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to carry out in languages other than English. This study aims to discover the characteristics of Indonesian lexical bundles that cover frequency, structure, and function in research articles. This study adopted a mixed-method. Identification of the lexical bundle was carried out using WordSmith 7.0 on a corpus comprising 3,125,546 words, taken from 1126 texts, and consisting of six disciplines. With a frequency threshold of 40 per million words and a minimum distribution of 5 texts, 197 lexical bundles have been obtained, consisting of three- to six-word bundles with a total occurrence of 51,813 times. In terms of structure, the incomplete structure is dominating the bundles by 78.7%, with a total frequency of occurrence 38,749 times. This research finds that the pattern of lexical bundles can be classified into five types: noun-based, prepositional-based, verb-based, adjective-based, and clause-based bundles. Lexical bundles in research articles are generally clause-based (49.2%). This indicates that Indonesian lexical bundles vary in structure. The use of clause fragments and passive verbs are the main features in this genre. In terms of the discourse function, research-oriented bundles are the functions that are commonly used, while participant-oriented bundles are the least. Each discourse function has its own structural characteristics. It is also found that one lexical bundle can have two functional categories. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of written academic discourse. From the pedagogical point of view, the findings can be used as learning material for both native and non-native speakers.


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