Lexical Bundles in Korean College Students' English Essays: A Corpus-based Comparative Study

The current study examined Korean college students' use of lexical bundles and compared with the use of those by native students' in their English essay writing. Here, the study chose 4-word bundles for data analysis. Because of the relatively small size (258 essays with 63,475 words in the learner writing corpus and 784 essays with 326,320 words in the native writing corpus) the raw frequency with more than 3 was included in the original data analysis. Both the Korean EFL learner corpus and the native reference corpus had many context-dependent bundles; those bundles were removed during the refinement procedure. The results indicated that Korean learners underused the lexical bundles which were frequently used by their native counterparts. Besides, due to the lack of Korean learners' proficiency and proper literacy, their colloquial language habits of the spoken discourse affected their use of lexical bundles in the written discourse, such as many uses of pronoun "I" and contractions in their selected lexical bundles. Finally, Korean learners used different structures and functions of lexical bundles compared with the native counterparts; they predominantly used VP-based structures and stance expressions, whereas native writers did not use the serious occupancy of specific structures and functions of bundles in their writing. Suggestions and teaching implications were drawn for the compounding and comprehensive understanding for the Korean EFL context.