Lexical bundles in native English speakers' and Thai writers' dissertations
The purposes of this corpus-driven study were to compare the use of four-word lexical bundles between native English and Thai dissertation writings. Two language corpora, roughly 1,000,000 words apiece, were gathered from dissertations in the field of English Language Teaching written by both...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/20552/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/20552/1/51628-191593-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The purposes of this corpus-driven study were to compare the use of four-word lexical bundles
between native English and Thai dissertation writings. Two language corpora, roughly 1,000,000
words apiece, were gathered from dissertations in the field of English Language Teaching written
by both groups of writers. Each corpus was subdivided into three sub-corpora, namely, the
Introduction, the Methodology, and the Results and Discussions sub-corpora. Two frameworks
employed for the structural and functional analysis of the four-word lexical bundles were Salazar's
(2011) adaptations of Biber et al.’s (1999) and Hyland’s (2008a). The analysis of lexical bundles
was performed using concordance software AntConc. The results showed that Thai writers
overused lexical bundles in comparison with that of English speaking writers in each part of the
dissertations, especially in the Results and Discussion section, which could result from institutional
factors such as expectation and practice of Thai universities that expect Thai Ph.D. students to be
more critical of the findings and to offer more implication. The structural analysis revealed the
overuse of verb-structured lexical bundles throughout the three sub-corpora of Thai writers, which
was likely to stem from the non-native speaker's failure to employ noun- and preposition-structured
lexical bundles effectively. The proportion of functions of lexical bundles in each section of
dissertations written by both groups of writers shared a relatively similar trend, indicating that
English speakers and Thai writers conformed to the same convention of dissertation writing. |
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