Stance in press releases versus business news: a lexical bundle approach

Press releases represent a hybrid business genre, which combines an informational and a promotional communicative purpose. The objective of the study is to assess the extent to which this duality is reflected in the language used, and more particularly in the expression of stance, by comparing corporate press releases with another business genre that is essentially informational, namely business news reporting. The focus is on lexical bundles, as they have been found to be a major conveyor of attitudinal and epistemic stance. Relying on the pattern-matching approach to language, 3-word lexical bundles are extracted from a 1-million-word corpus of press releases (BeRel) and set against those found in a similar-sized corpus of business news (BeNews). An examination of the key bundles (keyword analysis) in each corpus reveals that the bundles that are distinctive to press releases differ significantly from those found in BeNews, particularly in the expression of modal, evaluative and personal stance.

Exploring lexical bundles in low proficiency level L2 learners’ English writing: an ETS corpus study

The use of formulaic language in written discourse is an important indicator of language competence. Nonetheless, the features of lexical bundles used by lower proficiency English as a Foreign Language learners have received little attention. The present study addressed this gap by employing a corpus-based method to investigate the quantity, function, and quality of four-word lexical bundles produced by low proficiency L2 English writers with 11 different L1 backgrounds in response to a timed English writing assessment. The investigation was specifically anchored on the data extracted from 1,330 essays using Wordsmith 7.0. Results of the investigation showed (1) an over dependence on writing topic related bundles; (2) an Indo-European L1 language background positively influencing lexical bundle production; (3) an overuse of stance expressions and discourse organizers at the expense of referential expression usage; (4) L1 Japanese, Korean, and Telugu writers producing more accurate lexical bundles and L1 German writers producing fewer accurate lexical bundles; and (5) the frequent use of lexical bundles not leading to highly accurate and appropriate use of lexical bundles. The implications of these results were discussed in connection with foreign language education.

Effects of Teaching Lexical Bundles on EFL Students’ Abstract Genre Academic Writing Skills Improvement: Corpus-Based Research Design

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.

Comparing lexical bundle use in EAP reading textbooks to lower-division university textbooks

This study employed a corpus analysis to describe differences in lexical bundle patterns between English for academic purposes (EAP) reading textbooks and lower-division university textbooks by focusing on three characteristics: (1) the frequency of occurrence of bundles, (2) the frequency of bundle structures (e.g., phrasal vs. clausal), and (3) the frequency of bundle discourse functions (e.g., stance, discourse organizers, and referential; see Biber et al., 2004; Biber, 2006). Results revealed that the corpus representing lower-division university textbooks employed more passive bundles, intangible framing bundles, and text deixis bundles. On the other hand, the corpus representing EAP reading textbooks contained more prepositional phrase bundles, anticipatory it bundles, and place bundles. A qualitative comparison also revealed that quantity bundles in the corpus representing lower-division university textbooks made reference to technical and academic calculations. These results show how the communicative purposes of EAP reading textbooks differ from introductory university textbooks, which can be used to inform EAP reading instruction.

Indonesian lexical bundles in research articles: Frequency, structure, and function

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.

Methodological issues in contrastive lexical bundle research

This study explores the influence of corpus design when comparing lexical bundle use across groups, examining how the number of texts and average length of texts can impact conclusions about group differences. The study compares the use of lexical bundles by L1-English versus L2-English writers, based on analysis of two sub-corpora of academic articles that are matched for discipline, writer expertize, time of publication, and audience. However, the two sub-corpora differ with respect to the number of texts and the average length of texts. Three experiments examined the influence of differences in corpus composition. The results show that differences in the number of words and number of texts across sub-corpora can have a strong effect on claimed differences in bundle use across groups. This effect is found even when the texts in the corpora are closely matched for their register and topic.