Lexical bundles in Korean university students’ EFL compositions: A comparative study of register and use.

Choongil Yoon (윤충일); CHOI, JI-MYOUNG (최지명)

Lexical bundles in Korean university students’ EFL compositions: A comparative study of register and use.

Modern English Education
Abbr : MEESO
2015, 16(3), pp.47-69
Publisher : The Modern English Education Society
Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Language Teaching

Choongil Yoon ¹, CHOI, JI-MYOUNG ²

¹이화여자대학교
²연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Lexical bundles are considered important building blocks of discourse as they perform a wide range of discourse functions serving as markers of fluency and appropriacy of register-specific language use (Biber, 2009; Hyland, 2012). To investigate the extent to which this is the case with Korean university students’ English essays, the present study identified and analyzed four-word lexical bundles from a corpus of EFL argumentative essays written by Korean university students and compared the bundles identified with those from a corpus of native speaker (NS) students’ argumentative writing. Analysis of the bundles across grammatical structures and discourse functions revealed that compared to NS students, the Korean university students heavily relied on the bundles widely used in speech registers such as bundles containing personal pronouns and contractions and expressing stance. On the other hand, the Korean students’ essays were shown to have fewer incidences of nominalizations, hedging and referential bundles. A concordance analysis of on the other hand, the most frequently used bundle, showed a substantial number of erroneous and ineffective uses of the bundle as well. The paper concludes by discussing pedagogical implications for EFL composition pedagogy and suggestions for future studies.

KEYWORDS

lexical bundle, register, EFL composition

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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