A Corpus-based Study of Lexical Bundles in Rhetorical Moves of L1 and L2 Research Article Abstracts in Applied Linguistics

This paper aims to compare structural characteristics of lexical bundles in rhetorical moves of applied linguistics research abstracts written by two groups of L1 and L2 academic writers. This study makes a comparison of four-word lexical bundles frequency and structural types among five rhetorical moves. The corpora used in this comparative study were the Native Research Article Corpus for L1 writers and the Chinese Research Article Corpus for L2 writers, which made up of research article abstracts from both Chinese and international journals of applied linguistics from 2005 to 2015. The results show that L2 writers used more bundles than L1 writers did in the moves of purpose presenting the research (Move 2) and summarizing the findings (Move 4). In terms of lexical bundle structural types, both L1 and L2 writers used more VP-based lexical bundles than NP-based and PP-based bundles in each move. Compared with L1 writers, L2 writers demonstrated a tendency to overuse lexical bundles both in types and tokens. The findings may provide a good reference for academic writing instructions in English for academic purposes.