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Lexical Bundles and Generic Moves in the Discussion Sections of Research Articles by L1 and L2 Writers in Applied Linguistics: Adopting a Bundle-Move Approach

Tamleh, Hadis | 2020

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: English
  3. Document No: 53022 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Jahangard, Ali; Hassanzadeh, Mohammad
  7. Abstract:
  8. English research articles (henceforth RAs) have evolved into a vital medium for conveying and disseminating scientific knowledge. Mastering textual and linguistic conventions of academic prose assists English native and non-native authors in writing scientific RAs. Lexical bundles (LBs) refer to word combinations that co-occur frequently in a particular register (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999). In fact, they are an integral component of “fluent linguistic production” (Hyland, 2018, p. 4). For more than a century, LBs have attracted researchers' attention in corpus-driven studies, although the extent to which LBs vary between English native and non-native authors remains open to question. As for rhetorical organization, Swales’ (1990, 2004) seminal research into genre analysis inspired subsequent studies on generic move, sections of a text that serves a particular function. Drawing on a mixed-method approach, the principal purpose of this study was twofold: to investigate comparatively the use of LBs by English native and non-native scholars and to examine the association of LBs and generic moves.As the initial phase, the study set out to contrastively enquire into the use of English LBs in research article Discussions written by English and Iranian academic scholars in the field of Applied Linguistics. It investigated the similarities and differences between native and non-native scholars in terms of frequency, structures and functions of LBs. Two corpora consisting of the Discussion sections produced by both groups were culled: A 342, 242-word corpus from 243 English research article discussion sections (ERADC), versus 344,536-word corpus from 327 L2-Iranian research article discussion sections (IRADC). Only the journals with the high IF scores (2.0) and the most widely known publishers were picked out to develop both corpora. The inquiry adopted an automated frequency-driven approach to quantitative analysis of four-word LBs that appeared at least seven times in three different texts within two corpora. Then qualitative analyses of the structures and functions of bundle units were carried out based on the previous taxonomies developed by Biber et al., (1999) and Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004). AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis, was used to draw out four-word LBs. Furthermore, several Chi-square tests were performed to scrutinize the statistical significance of the differences. Iranian authors significantly employed more bundle types and tokens. As for the rest of the investigation, only the top fifty LBs were analyzed on account of their high occurrence. Within these bundles, there were eighteen shared bundles, however, the two groups used them very differently.With respect to the structural classification of LBs, the results underscored the prevalence of phrasal bundles in both corpora. Clausal bundles were mainly observed in the Discussion sections written by Iranian authors. As for functional classification of bundles, authors utilized referential bundles with higher frequency compared with stance bundles and discourse organizers. On comparing English with Iranian authors, although both groups employed different proportions of bundle types, the latter utilized tokens with greater frequency than did English authors.For the second phase of the study, based on Dudley-Evans’ (1994) model of move analysis, the inquiry concentrated on bundle dispersion to examine how the top twenty four-word LBs were linked with each rhetorical move. The results of the present study accentuated the specificity and density of LBs within several moves. Furthermore, the results provide insight into the importance of the awareness of genre conventions and how lexical bundles are spread over generic moves
  9. Keywords:
  10. Corpus ; Lexical Bundles ; Discussion Section ; Move Analysis ; Native English Authores ; Iraninan Non-Native Authores

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