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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:2 (2019) ► pp.143–168

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Lexical bundles in university course materials

From academic English to pathway to mainstream engineering

 | Colorado State University
 | Colorado State University
Published online: 5 August 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17075.nek
Abstract
The present study compared 4-word lexical bundles found in a general engineering corpus (2,030,000 words) with those found in a corpus of texts collected from a Pathway engineering course for ESL (English as a Second Language) students (356,000 words) and a corpus of pedagogical materials used to teach advanced ESL students at an intensive English program (440,000 words). The results indicated that the structural and functional characteristics of the lexical bundles in the Pathway engineering materials were representative of the discourse features found in the general engineering corpus. This finding provides additional evidence of the overall appropriateness of the pedagogical materials selected for the Pathway course. Furthermore, the two engineering corpora also included a substantial number of bundles that were unique to the specific course materials, and, therefore, can potentially be targeted during language instruction.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexical bundles in research on discourse variation
    • 2.1Characteristic features of lexical bundles
    • 2.2Empirical research on lexical bundles in discipline-specific texts
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Corpora
      • 3.1.1General academic English corpus
      • 3.1.2Pathway engineering corpus
      • 3.1.3General engineering corpus
    • 3.2Identification of lexical bundles
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Classification of lexical bundles
      • 4.1.1Structural analysis
      • 4.1.2Functional analysis
    • 4.2Comparison of target bundles across three corpora
  • 5.Conclusions and implications for pedagogy
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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