Ayatollah Razmjoo; Zahra Montasseri
Volume 10, Issue 21 , June 2018, , Pages 185-204
Abstract
Formulaic language and sequence as the core characteristic of real-life language and native-like fluency, has been a subject of inquiry in recent decades. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effects of two extensive reading text types, i.e., adaptive and authentic, on Iranian EFL learners’ ...
Read More
Formulaic language and sequence as the core characteristic of real-life language and native-like fluency, has been a subject of inquiry in recent decades. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effects of two extensive reading text types, i.e., adaptive and authentic, on Iranian EFL learners’ development of lexical bundles. To this aim, 20 intermediate EFL learners were chosen to participate in a time-series experiment, in which one class received adaptive texts as their extensive reading project, while the other experienced authentic texts of graded readers. The learners were required to read texts and write summaries, out of which the frequency and percentage of lexical bundles were extracted. The results of frequency and t-tests revealed that learners who benefited from adaptive texts were more successful in lexical bundles progress. While the other group also indicated to have improved in terms of multi-word chunks, the shift was not statistically significant. It is recommended that teachers allocate more class time to explicit and implicit instruction of lexical bundles.
Zahra Amirian; Somayeh Ketabi; Hamed Eshaghi
Volume 5, Issue 11 , November 2013, , Pages 1-29
Abstract
Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively ...
Read More
Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. One of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content. Lexical bundles are one of the features which play significant role in building genres’ regularities. Many researchers have tried to define academic writing with resort to the lexical bundles employed in it. Advanced and high intermediate L2 students’ pieces of writing and also post-graduate writing have been analyzed in different aspects. However, the important element in the analysis of post-graduate writing has always been the differences between genres across disciplines. In other words, in investigating lexical bundles in different genres, researchers have not focused on the issue of “nativity of the writer. To be exact, they consider native and non-native writing to share the same features. By considering this gap in lexical bundles studies, the present paper is an attempt to explore the nature of lexical bundles in native and non-native post-graduate students’ writing. In order to do so, a corpus of about one-million words from Iranian students’ applied linguistics theses is compared with a corpus of the same size from native English students’ applied linguistics theses. The results show significant differences in the frequency of lexical bundles used by native and Iranian students and also in structural and functional patterns used.
