A corpus-based teaching of lexical bundles to enhance writing skills of prospective Turkish EFL teachers

Abstract

Despite the surge in lexical bundle instruction in EFL studies, very little research has looked at how explicit lexical bundle instruction affects prospective Turkish EFL teachers’ academic writing abilities on a quantitative level. As a result, the purpose of this study is to determine whether teaching lexical bundles has an impact on developing prospective Turkish teachers’ writing skills in terms of accuracy and appropriacy. Thirty aspiring EFL teachers who were enrolled in Tokat Gaziosmanpaşa University’s ELT program participated in the study. They were all 1st-year students taking academic writing classes. As a pre-test and post-test assignment, participants were to create an argument paragraph and data was collected with assignment worksheets. A paired-sample t-test was used to compare the writing scores of the participants before and after the lexical bundles’ instruction session to see if there was a statistically significant difference between the two. For accuracy, the researcher used Colovic-Markovic’s scoring matrix. Results were in favor of using lexical bundle instruction in EFL studies. Keywords:EFL, lexical bundle, Turkish teachers, writing skills