In the recent years, globalization prepared a ground for English to be the lingua franca of the academia. Thus, most highly prestigious international journals have defined their medium of publications as English. However, even advanced language learners have difficulties in writing their research articles due to the lack of appropriate lexical knowledge and discourse conventions of academia. Considering the fact that the underuse, overuse and misuse of formulaic sequences or lexical bundles are often characterized with non-native writers of English, lexical bundle studies have recently been on the top of the agenda of corpus studies. Although the related literature has represented specific genres or disciplines, no study has scrutinized lexical bundles in the research articles that are written in the educational sciences. Therefore, the current study compared the structural and functional characteristics of the lexical-bundle use in L1 and L2 research articles in English. The results revealed the deviation of the usages of lexical bundles by the non-native speakers of English from the native speaker norms. Furthermore, the results indicated the overuse of clausal or verb-phrase based lexical bundles in the research articles of Turkish scholars while their native counterparts used noun and prepositional phrase-based lexical bundles more than clausal bundles.

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Reading is an indispensable skill for learners who desire success throughout their academic lives, and vocabulary knowledge is a sine qua non companion of reading comprehension. Despite being inextricably related entities, very little has been written about the necessary vocabulary coverage to understand an expository text and its equivalent in terms of vocabulary size in Turkish EFL context. Therefore, with this study, we focused on the relationship between the vocabulary coverage and reading comprehension of a group of foreign language learners. For this study, 178 university students completed a vocabulary checklist based on the vocabulary items of two different expository texts, and their reading comprehension levels were measured through two piloted reading comprehension tests for each text. The descriptive statistics, Pearson' s correlation value and regression analysis were employed to analyze the data. The results revealed that the text-based vocabulary knowledge moderately correlated with reading comprehension, and there was a relatively linear relationship between them. It was also concluded that the 98% vocabulary coverage is needed for foreign language learners to comprehend academic texts, and this coverage, in fact, refers to approximately the most frequent 8000 word-families based on the related studies.

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