Features of Lexical Bundles in Academic Writing by Non-Native vis-à-vie Native Speakers of English

The study investigates the use of lexical bundles in academic English by non-native versus native writers both quantitatively and qualitatively. For the purpose, the material was culled from two writing corpora: one from a learner corpus of university student writing and the other from a comparable native speaker writing corpus, British Academic Written English(BAWE). Then the list of recurrent four-word lexical bundles of the learner corpus was retrieved and compared against that of the reference corpus. While there is a considerable variation in the types, structures and styles between two corpora, the bundles by Korean L2 writers are characterized by overuse of sequences including personal pronouns I/you, colloquial expressions like a lot of and certain fixed deictic terms like all over the world reflecting lack of register awareness. On the other hand, L2 writing exhibits fewer instances of unattended this constructions, PP and of-noun phrasal units, passive forms and anticipatory it structures, which are typically adopted in academic writing discourse. In addition, Korean students’ writing displays insufficient use of hedging devices, particularly in conjunction with syntactically complex constructions. Drawing upon the distinctive features of lexical bundles in L2 writing, the study suggests pedagogical implications for written academic discourse.