The Use of Lexical Bundles in Native and Non-native Post-graduate Writing: The Case of Applied Linguistics MA Theses

Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. One of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content. Lexical bundles are one of the features which play significant role in building genres’ regularities. Many researchers have tried to define academic writing with resort to the lexical bundles employed in it. Advanced and high intermediate L2 students’ pieces of writing and also post-graduate writing have been analyzed in different aspects. However, the important element in the analysis of post-graduate writing has always been the differences between genres across disciplines. In other words, in investigating lexical bundles in different genres, researchers have not focused on the issue of “nativity of the writer. To be exact, they consider native and non-native writing to share the same features. By considering this gap in lexical bundles studies, the present paper is an attempt to explore the nature of lexical bundles in native and non-native post-graduate students’ writing. In order to do so, a corpus of about one-million words from Iranian students’ applied linguistics theses is compared with a corpus of the same size from native English students’ applied linguistics theses. The results show significant differences in the frequency of lexical bundles used by native and Iranian students and also in structural and functional patterns used.