From Do You Know to I Don’t Know: An Analysis of the Frequency and Usefulness of Lexical Bundles in Five English Language Self-Study Books

Abstract

Knowing which phrases to use in everyday situations is a key part of communicating effectively in English, and increasingly language learning materials are expected to reflect this. This paper presents a corpus analysis of five contemporary self-study books for English language learners, to identify common phrases taught, assess their form and function, and evaluate them against a baseline of lexical bundles (i.e. recurring sequences of words) used in social situations by users of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Self-study textbooks aim to equip the learner with enough English to function appropriately in a range of different contexts; they usually present language in the form of dialogues in common everyday situations, often supplemented with exercises, grammar explanations and glossaries. While they may differ in pedagogical approach, it could be anticipated that the lexical bundles found would be broadly similar. However, analysis of this corpus showed a lack of consistency both in the form and number of bundles found in the different publications. Furthermore, comparison with a corpus of ELF conversations extracted from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE, version 2.0 XML) (2013) highlighted the underrepresentation of lexical bundles with certain pragmatic functions, such as hedges/stance expressions (I don't know, I think) and vague language (a little bit).

The Structure and Function of Lexical Bundles in Communicative Saudi High School EFL Textbooks

“…This is because comparing the number of occurrences of lexical bundles in the 11.5-million-word BNC2014 with the 290,053-word textbook corpus would inevitably inflate the results and would not allow an accurate comparison. A more appropriate approach, in this case, is creating a representative sample of the BNC2014 similar in size to the textbook corpus (e.g., Allan, 2017;Northbrook & Conklin, 2018b). As such, a sample of BNC 2014 was created using a stratified sampling technique (see Table 2), resulting in a smaller sized sample corpus containing 290,057 words.…”

“…Several studies have evaluated ELT university textbooks' use of lexical bundles. Most of them have found a mismatch between the lexical bundles presented in ELT materials and that of a reference corpus (Allan, 2017;Alquraishi, 2014;L. Chen, 2010;Coxhead et al, 2017;Wood, 2010;Wood & Appel, 2014), with only one study reporting a match in their data (Nekrasova-Beker & Becker, 2019).…”

“…Chen, 2010;Coxhead et al, 2017;Wood, 2010;Wood & Appel, 2014), with only one study reporting a match in their data (Nekrasova-Beker & Becker, 2019). For example, Allan (2017) analyzed lexical bundles in five different selfstudy books for English language learners to examine their frequency, structural and functional patterns by comparing them to those used in a spoken corpus of conversational English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Results show that some of the pragmatic functions of lexical bundles in the books analyzed were misrepresented, including hedges (e.g., I don't know) and vague language (e.g., a little bit) compared to the ELF corpus.…”

“…A difference in lexico-grammatical structures is reported in Northbrook and Conklin (2018b), which observed that the textbooks' bundles are presented in a limited set of structures. Also, Allan's (2017) study found that stance bundles described as "informal bundles, and largely related to the management of conversation and extended turns" (370) were missing in the analyzed English self-study textbooks.…”

Discourse Functions of Lexical Bundles in Pakistani Chemistry and Physics Textbooks

“…Moreover, Biber (2006) identified similarities and differences in LBs across various disciplines, genres, and registers. Furthermore, LBs in English as a lingua franca concerning English self-study textbooks have also been explored (Allan, 2017). However, in the Pakistani context, there is little research conducted concerning LBs.…”