In other words: exploring student criticality through lexical bundles

Lexical bundles play a crucial role in conveying evaluations, opinions, and attitudes in both spoken and written communication. These recurring multiword sequences are recognised as essential components of fluent and natural linguistic expression in academic texts. However, although lexical bundles are significant in expressing personal and professional evaluations, their use in the literature review genre remains relatively underexplored. This corpus-based study analyses a self-compiled learner corpus of literature review chapters from Applied Linguistics Master’s theses using WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012). A total of 60 four-word lexical bundles were identified and categorised into epistemic and attitudinal functions. The findings reveal a strong reliance on impersonal epistemic bundles such as “it can be said” and “due to the fact”, indicating learners’ tendency to hedge claims and express cautious evaluations. Among attitudinal bundles, those related to ability (e.g., “to be able to”, “can be used to”) were the most frequent, suggesting an emphasis on potential and capacity rather than assertive critique. Bundles signalling importance and obligation were also common, while those expressing evaluation or contrast appeared less frequently—except “on the other hand”, which had the highest overall frequency and distribution. These findings suggest that student writers employ lexical bundles to project a measured and often tentative stance, reflecting a developing sense of criticality. The study offers pedagogical insights for academic writing instruction, particularly in fostering more confident and balanced expressions of evaluation in literature review writing.