Structures and Functions of Lexical Bundles in Findings and Discussion Sections of Graduate Students’ Thesis

Abstract


 
 
 
 Lexical bundles is a combination of words which consists of three or even more words that frequently occur together in particular registers. It is seen as an important aspect that should be mastered in order to create a qualified text. This study aims at analyzing the lexical bundles used in findings and discussion sections of graduate students’ thesis in terms of structures, functions, and the role of lexical bundles in forming coherence of the students’ texts. This study employs qualitative approach. The data are taken from 10 Chapter IV, Findings and Discussion of graduate students’ thesis. In the process of analysis, the researcher uses three instruments in the form of tables to collect and analyze the lexical bundles manually based on the structures of lexical bundles proposed by Biber, et. al. (1999), and the functions of lexical bundles proposed by Hyland (2008) framework. There are 74 lexical bundles found in the students’ texts. The findings reveals that first, the lexical bundles found in the students’ texts make use of all the twelve structural forms and the most dominantly used is structure type 4 other prepositional phrase (fragment); second, the lexical bundles found in the students’ texts serve all of the three functional types and the most dominantly used is text-oriented function and third, the lexical bundles found in the students’ texts have an important role in forming coherence of the texts. It indicates that the lexical bundles make use of two coherence items such as reference and transition signals.
 
 
 

Comparing Lexical Bundles in Medical Research Article Abstracts of Iranian and Foreign Journals

“…Together they accounted for over half of the extracted bundles in MRA abstracts of foreign and Iranian journals. In terms of the functional patterns, consistent with the results of the previous researchers (e.g., Hyland, 2008a;Rezoug & Vincent, 2018;Wachidah, Fitriati, & Widhiyanto, 2020), research-oriented bundles were predominant in MRA abstracts of both classes. However, as clearly illustrated, significant differences were seen in the distribution of sub-structures, sub-functions, and frequencies of the shared bundles in MRA abstracts of foreign and Iranian journals.…”

English Lexical Bundles in the Graduate Theses: The Frequency, Structure and Distribution

“…The mean score of pretest of the experimental group is 51.72, while the control group is 68.28. (2017_TR) However, the findings of this research were different from the previous study by Wachidah et al (2020) who identified other prepositional phrase fragments (following Biber"s taxonomy) such as "from the result of", "in the same time", and "by looking at the" as the most frequent lexical bundles in ten Findings and Discussion section of graduate students theses. Previous research which used a manual approach to identify lexical bundles in ten graduate students" theses might account for the differences.…”

“…They found that research-oriented bundles dominated the text. In addition, Wachidah et al (2020) found that text-oriented was the most frequent lexical bundles in Findings and Discussion section of ten graduate students theses.…”

“…Functionally, research-oriented lexical bundles are the biggest portion in the abstracts of student theses (Samodra & Pratiwi, 2018). Meanwhile, in the different part of student theses, Findings and Discussion section, Wachidah et al (2020) concluded that text-oriented function is the most common lexical bundles based on physical data collection.…”

“…Samodra & Pratiwi (2018) identified three and fourword combinations in undergraduate thesis abstracts of Indonesian and English. Wachidah et al (2020) used non-corpus approach to investigate word combinations that occurred in the Findings and Discussion Section of ten randomized graduate theses. Manually, the data were taken from 10 graduate students" theses.…”