L1 vs. L2 English Writers in Applied Linguistics: Functional Patterns of Lexical Bundles

The present study conducts a comparative analysis of the way lexical bundles are used across Pakistani expert corpus, and American expert corpus. The Pakistani corpus consists of the genre of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) recognized research journal while the American corpus comprised Applied Linguistics research articles authored by the American professional authors and published in the high impact factor international research journals. The American corpus consists of 1018795 words and the Pakistani expert corpus comprised 1016435 words. I have used AntConc software to extract frequently occurring lexical bundles from the two corpora. These bundles were classified into functional categories following Hyland (2008a) model of Functional Classification of Lexical bundles. The outcomes of the study indicate some observable disparities in the linguistic realization of lexical bundles across American and Pakistani corpora. Most of the bundles in American corpus have performed the function of textual organization, discourse coherence and contextualization. Whereas Pakistani authors have used same type of bundles redundantly mostly for the purpose of description of the research process. The findings of the study imply a lack of knowledge of the conventions of the use of lexical bundles by Pakistani authors and highlight on the need of training of Pakistani authors of this aspect of the English language as L2.