The structural features of English lexical bundles in academic essays written by Filipino college students

Lexical bundles are part of any writing production. As these recurrent word combinations appear in various written outputs, many linguists, students, and researchers have become interested in exploring such linguistic expressions. However, most of them who examined the features of lexical bundles us...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Rey John Castro Villanueva
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Santo Tomas 2015-12-01
Series:Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS)
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ajels.ust.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/6-The-structural-features-of-English-lexical-bundles-in-academic-essays-written-by-Filipino-college-students.pdf
Description
Summary:Lexical bundles are part of any writing production. As these recurrent word combinations appear in various written outputs, many linguists, students, and researchers have become interested in exploring such linguistic expressions. However, most of them who examined the features of lexical bundles used computer corpora collected from native speakers of English. Therefore, little is known about lexical bundles produced by nonnative users of English, particularly the Filipinos who use English as their second language in government, business, religion, and education domains. Using the structural categories developed by Biber et al. (1999), this study examined the grammatical characteristics of three- and four-word English lexical bundles in a 100,000-word corpus produced by college students from different Philippine colleges and universities. The results revealed that the students seemed to have insufficient knowledge of these language units because a majority of them used obscure and unsophisticated bundles. Thus, the findings of the study imply that the students should familiarize themselves with these English lexical bundles, for these word combinations serve as basic elements or building blocks for their written outputs.
ISSN:2619-7219