Although the idea of collocation has been the core of the Firthian linguistic approach, only recently did language researchers and practitioners pay close attention to recurrent multi-word combinations or lexical bundles. Unlike the studies of roles of collocation in a language, the research of lexical bundles has shown that they are crucial building blocks of discourse and register in academic disciplines. Given the fact that the role of lexical bundles in the writings of academic community has become a subject of ESL/EFL, the current study investigates the functional distribution of lexical bundles between the argumentative writing corpora contributed by Korean and American college students. The functional lexical bundle types and tokens are compared regarding the distribution and frequency. A series of statistical analyses demonstrated that, in the Korean students' argumentative writing, stance lexical bundle and discourse organizers are more frequently used. On the other hand, the American students' writing includes more referential expressions. These findings suggest that, when aiming for a proficient and advanced writing level, Korean college students need to be frequently exposed to lexical bundles and explicitly taught with the discourse functions in the academic writing genre. This paper also introduces and discusses pedagogical implications and future research suggestions.
Multiword expressions are a contiguous series of words in a text. This study examines the phraseological profile based on multiword expressions in argumentative writings in a 120,000-word collection of nonnative prospective university students’ writing. The profile is compared with two sets of American university students’ writing from two corpora that comprise upper-level American university students’ course papers and argumentative essay texts. The data are investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the structure (i.e., noun, verb, and prepositional phrases) and function (i.e., stance, referential, and text organizer). The results show some noticeable differences among these sets of writing. The Korean student writers heavily relied on verb phrase-based expressions (e.g., are a lot of) in their writing whereas the American students preferred noun phrases. Functionally, the Korean writers underused referential function expressions (e.g., the idea of the) compared to their counterparts. In addition, the prospective Korean university students’ writing was found to represent the widest range of multiword expressions whereas the American students’ argumentative course papers exhibited the smallest range. The findings suggest that prospective Korean university students’ writing tends to use more features of verbal conversation while American university students’ writing exhibits features of structured argumentative writing. The implications for teaching writing and limitations of the study are discussed.
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