Multi-word Sequences in Learner Corpora: A Corpus Analysis of Lexical Bundles / Ang Leng Hong and He Mengyu

There have been longstanding attempts to establish frequency profiles of words which are
specific to academic register in order to facilitate learners in composing fluent academic
writing. A more noteworthy effort was by Coxhead who proposed the Academic Word List
(Coxhead, 2000). Recent developments in the field have increasingly regarded multi-word
sequences such as lexical phrases, lexical bundles, formulas and clusters as crucially important
and functionally significant in the academic contexts (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010). The present
study adopts a corpus-based approach to identify a type of multi-word sequence, i.e., lexical
bundles in student academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from a corpus of Asian college
student essays and a corpus of British university-level student writing are identified, analysed
and compared using corpus-linguistic techniques. The results of the analysis show that certain
lexical bundles share the same keywords. This keyword sharing characteristic suggests that
lexical bundles are internally analysable although they are initially retrieved as continuous
strings of words. Besides, there is no significant difference in the functional use of lexical
bundles between the Asian learners and British native students. However, both Asian learners
and British university students are found to prefer different types of lexical bundles. Simpson-
Vlach and Ellis’s (2010) functional classification taxonomy (e.g., referential expressions, stance
expressions, discourse organising functions) is used to categorise and analyse the items
functionally. Finally this paper discusses the pedagogical implications drawn from the analysis.