Investigating Lexical Bundles Across Learner Writing Development

Chen, Yu-Hua (2009) Investigating Lexical Bundles Across Learner Writing Development. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora of writing from Li Chinese learners of L2 English and two native corpora, attempting to explore and identify the differences and similarities in the use of lexical bundles across learner proficiencies as well as between native and non-native writing. The morphosyntactic features in second language writing have been extensively researched during the past decades. Few studies, however, have attempted to extend attention outward to the discourse aspect of learner writing by examining large quantities of empirical data. The present thesis hence addressed a textual perspective via a frequency-driven phraseological approach, i.e. to look into the discourse aspect of learner language development through lexical bundles (a.k.a. recurrent word combinations). In Modular Study 1, learner essays written by L2 students were compared with two corpora of Li written English: one referring to native expert writing and the other native peer writing. The native expert writing was extracted from the component of academic prose in the FLOB corpus (FLOB-J). The two groups of student writing, L2 writing of Li Chinese students (BAWE-CH) and Li peer writing of British students (BAWE-EN), both come from the BAWE corpus, which compiled proficient assessed student writing from British universities. In Modular Study 2, argumentative and expository essays chosen from the Longman Learner Corpus were rated by at least two experienced raters. Adopting a rigorous rating procedure (including benchmarking, rater training, and statistic analyses) as generally used in highstakes language tests, proficiency was determined with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Two sizeable subcorpora representing two CEFR levels, B2 and Cl, were selected for investigation. Through various ways of comparison, i.e. structural and functional categorisation as well as the keyness analysis, a few developmental patterns in the use of lexical bundles have been identified. The results show that at the lower proficiency levels, learner language tends.to be more simplistic, colloquial, cliched, verbose, categorical, and overstating. In comparison, the more proficient writing demonstrates an opposite pattern, thereby being more nativelike in this regard. The interpretations of results and the implications for 12 writing pedagogy, language testing, and psycholinguistics will be discussed. A few methodological issues, such as the use of chi-square tests and determination of a frequency and dispersion threshold in bundle studies, will be addressed too.