Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry

Referred to as extended collocations, lexical bundles are considered as a main factor in building fluency in academic discourse; helping to shape meaning and coherence in a text or speech. For decades, lexical bundles have attracted considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in Englis...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kashiha, Hadi, Chan, Swee Heng
Format: Article
Published: Australian International Academic Centre 2014
_version_ 1825948656850698240
author Kashiha, Hadi
Chan, Swee Heng
author_facet Kashiha, Hadi
Chan, Swee Heng
author_sort Kashiha, Hadi
collection UPM
description Referred to as extended collocations, lexical bundles are considered as a main factor in building fluency in academic discourse; helping to shape meaning and coherence in a text or speech. For decades, lexical bundles have attracted considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). While, the focus of the most of the studies on lexical bundles was to explore the use of these multi-word expressions in academic written registers such as research articles, academic spoken registers such as university lectures have not received that amount of attention from the scholars. In this vein, there is still an open question of how they are structurally different across disciplines. With these concerns in mind, this study aimed to explore how lexical bundles are used structurally in a 50291 words corpus of 8 university lectures across two disciplines: chemistry and politics. To this aim, the most frequent four-word bundles in the corpus were classified according to their grammatical types to see the possible disciplinary variations in their frequency of use as well as the structure involved in their use. Results of the analysis revealed that noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments were the most common structures in the lectures of the two disciplines, accounting for more than half of the bundles in politics. University lecturers appear to apply a variety of structures in the use of lexical bundles often peculiar to the discipline in order to convey their disciplinary messages. This would lead to the need to emphasize the instruction of the most common structures in that discipline in a way for the lectures to be as comprehensive as possible for the intended audiences.
first_indexed 2024-03-06T08:32:29Z
format Article
id upm.eprints-35489
institution Universiti Putra Malaysia
last_indexed 2024-03-06T08:32:29Z
publishDate 2014
publisher Australian International Academic Centre
record_format dspace
spelling upm.eprints-354892016-01-11T03:12:46Z http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/35489/ Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry Kashiha, Hadi Chan, Swee Heng Referred to as extended collocations, lexical bundles are considered as a main factor in building fluency in academic discourse; helping to shape meaning and coherence in a text or speech. For decades, lexical bundles have attracted considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). While, the focus of the most of the studies on lexical bundles was to explore the use of these multi-word expressions in academic written registers such as research articles, academic spoken registers such as university lectures have not received that amount of attention from the scholars. In this vein, there is still an open question of how they are structurally different across disciplines. With these concerns in mind, this study aimed to explore how lexical bundles are used structurally in a 50291 words corpus of 8 university lectures across two disciplines: chemistry and politics. To this aim, the most frequent four-word bundles in the corpus were classified according to their grammatical types to see the possible disciplinary variations in their frequency of use as well as the structure involved in their use. Results of the analysis revealed that noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments were the most common structures in the lectures of the two disciplines, accounting for more than half of the bundles in politics. University lecturers appear to apply a variety of structures in the use of lexical bundles often peculiar to the discipline in order to convey their disciplinary messages. This would lead to the need to emphasize the instruction of the most common structures in that discipline in a way for the lectures to be as comprehensive as possible for the intended audiences. Australian International Academic Centre 2014-01 Article PeerReviewed Kashiha, Hadi and Chan, Swee Heng (2014) Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 3 (1). pp. 224-230. ISSN 2200-3592; ESSN: 2200-3452 http://www.journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJALEL/article/view/1055
spellingShingle Kashiha, Hadi
Chan, Swee Heng
Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title_full Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title_fullStr Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title_full_unstemmed Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title_short Structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
title_sort structural analysis of lexical bundles in university lectures of politics and chemistry
work_keys_str_mv AT kashihahadi structuralanalysisoflexicalbundlesinuniversitylecturesofpoliticsandchemistry
AT chansweeheng structuralanalysisoflexicalbundlesinuniversitylecturesofpoliticsandchemistry