Lexical Bundles in the Academic Writing of Advanced Chinese EFL Learners

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles in the academic writing of advanced Chinese EFL learners. A corpus of doctoral dissertations by the learners and a corpus of published journal articles by professional writers were collected for the study. Four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora were identified and analysed. Results showed that the advanced learner writers used much more lexical bundles and much more different lexical bundles in their academic writing than professional authors. Structural analysis of the bundles indicated that the learners and the professional writers used similar amount of prepositional phrases, noun phrases, be + noun/ adjectival phrases and other structures of bundles. However, the learners used more passive structures and less anticipatory it structures of bundles than the professional writers. As for the functions of the bundles, the two groups of writers used a similar amount of research-oriented and text-oriented bundles. Nevertheless, the learners used less participant-oriented bundles than the professional writers. It was argued that the overuse of passive structures and the underuse of anticipatory it structures and participant-oriented bundles may be due to the learners’ preference for the impersonality in their academic prose.