An exploration of the structural and colligational characteristics of lexical bundles in L1–L2 corpora for English language teaching

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational possibilities have received little attention in English language teaching (ELT). This study examined lexical bundles, a type of multi-word expressions, to understand their structure and co-occurrence possibilities with other syntactic elements. It was aided by an automated frequency-driven approach using two corpora, the British component of the British National Corpus – a first language (L1) corpus – and a purpose-built Nigerian Media Discourse corpus – a second language (L2) corpus. Two items of lexical analysis software were used to extract three-word lexical bundles with a minimum of 50 frequencies per corpus. The syntactic structures of the identified lexical bundles were determined, and their in-corpus usages were analysed for their colligational characteristics. Results showed that both corpora had instances of general and genre-specific lexical bundles (LBs) with varying frequencies. Five categories of lexical bundles with different structural patterns and peculiar colligational characteristics were identified in the study. Since lexical bundles are more frequently found in both L1–L2 texts, mastering how they are used will further enhance the teaching of English as a second language. The teaching of lexical bundles as a multi-word expression is therefore recommended in ELT as a way of enhancing learners’ proficiency and naturalness in English.

RECURRENT LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH RESTAURANT REVIEWS: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of recurrent vocabulary and phraseologyin written English food discourse. More specifi cally, it focuses on the use and discourse functions of keywords, key multi-word terms and lexical bundles in a specialized corpus comprising 200 professional restaurant reviews that were published in online editions of selected British and American newspapers. The results of the study indicate that the most distinctive lexical feature of the analyzed texts is the frequent mention of ingredients and the limited presence of stance devices. The most frequently mentioned aspects of the referential content also show that what is evaluated is the total experience of eating and dining at a restaurant. These fi ndings contribute to the area of English forSpecific Purposes, off ering pedagogical potential that can be exploited when developing purpose-made teaching materials for students in food-related programs who need to learn the specialized vocabulary of their target profession.

A Comparison of Two Genres: Lexical Bundles in the Discourse of Applied Linguistics

The present article is a corpus-based descriptive/comparative study of lexical bundles (LBs) in two university genres: textbooks (TBs) and research articles (RAs) on applied linguistics. It aims to identify the LBs used in the two genres, compare them on the basis of their functional type and frequency and explore how they are related to genre. To this end, four-word LBs were identified in two corpora drawn from applied linguistics TBs and RAs. The comparative analysis revealed that there are interesting differences between the two genres in terms of discourse functions: the occurrence of LBs in the TBs was lower than in the RAs; attitudinal/modality LBs occurred more frequently in the TBs than in the RAs; epistemic LBs occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; discourse organizers occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; and time, place and text reference LBs occurred almost twice as frequently in the RAs. The findings build on research into the variations of genres in terms of the use and functions of LBs in discipline-specific corpora.

Lexical Bundles in the Corpus of Slovak Judicial Decisions

The paper follows the tradition of research in legal linguistics and into formulaic language, specifically into lexical bundles. The aim of the paper is to describe lexical bundles in samples from the corpus of Slovak judicial decisions OD-JUSTICE by means of quantitative characteristics of the identified bundles and by their comparison with bundles found in two other specialized corpora: the corpus of Slovak legal regulations and the corpus of annual reports by Slovak public institutions. For the identification of bundles, the concept of the h-point was used. Identified bundles are described with respect to their maximal, minimal, average, median and mode values, distributions and ratios. The aim of the paper is to outline an interpretation of these bundle characteristics with regard to communicative function(s) of compared document genres.

On L2 English Learners’ Formulaic Language Use and Spoken English Fluency

This study explored the distribution of three types of English formulaic language, which involves four categories in L1 Chinese L2 English learners’ speaking performance. In addition, it investigated the relationship between the English learners’ use of formulaic language and their spoken English fluency. A CCA (canonical correlation analysis) was conducted to examine the correlations between two sets of fluency variables (dependent variables) and linguistic variables of English formulaic language use (independent variables). The fluency variable set consists of: (1) temporal indices such as SR (speech rate), AR (articulation rate), MLR (mean length of run), and PTR (phonation time ratio); (2) linguistic variables of English formulaic language like F2R (two-word formulaic sequences/run ratio, B3R (three-word lexical bundles/run ratio), and B4R (four-word lexical bundles/run ratio). These are calculated according to the frequency of the English formulaic language in the speech samples of the participants (n = 86) across three academic levels. The results indicate that the learners’ spoken English fluency is highly related to their use of English formulaic language. Its limitations and future research directions are also discussed.