A Corpus Study of Structural Types of Lexical Bundles in MUET Reading Texts

Abstract

In view of the recurrent issues concerning university students' inability to comprehend reading passages in their studies, texts used in a Malaysian examination for tertiary education were analysed. This study investigates the use of lexical bundles (LBs) in the reading passages of Malaysian University English Test (MUET). A specialised corpus of MUET test papers comprised of only the reading passages grouped into two main disciplines namely arts and science was built. Besides identifying commonly used LBs, this study aims to compare and contrast structural types of LBs found in arts and science-based texts. Using WordSmith Tools version 5, the lists of LBs of the identified disciplines were generated. They were analysed qualitatively based on Biber, Conrad & Cortes' (2004) Structural Taxonomy. Findings revealed that the number of LBs in both disciplines differs significantly but many similar LBs are employed. It was also evident that science-based texts tend to employ more NP-based and VP-based LBs while the most commonly used structure in arts-

Language Corpora: The Case for Ghanaian English

“…A typical case in point is the renewed interest in lexical studies that have come about as a result of electronic corpus analysis. Recent work on the semantic association of words (collocation, semantic prosody, and semantic preference), such as Hunston (2008), Römer &Schulze (2010) andSook Beng &Chee Keong (2014), has been accomplished because of the availability of computer corpus tools. In the next sub-section, we consider what a corpus is, and also highlight the key issues for consideration in the construction of a corpus.…”