Understanding the Sustainable Growth of EFL Students’ Writing Skills: Differences between Novice and Expert Writers in Their Use of Lexical Bundles in Academic Writing

Lexical bundles, as building blocks of discourse, play vital roles in helping members from the same academic community achieve successful communication and disseminate sustainable disciplinary knowledge. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles postgraduate writing. Drawing on Biber et al.’s (1999) structural taxonomy Hyland’s (2008a) functional taxonomy, we identified compared two self-built corpora, an EFL student writing corpus expert corpus. The results indicate considerable differences between groups: writers used verb phrase-based more frequently prepositional noun less frequently. In terms function, although groups showed similar distributions three main categories, they exhibited insufficient reader-awareness incomplete knowledge stance expressions. It is hoped that findings will shed light future pedagogical practices help novice improve their competence a goal enhancing scholarship.