A Contrastive Study on Lexical Bundles in Argumentative Writing by L1-Chinese and L1-English Undergraduates

This study compares the use of lexical bundles in argumentative essays written by L1-Chinese students and L1-English students through a corpus-based approach. The data consist of two corpora- a L1-Chinese corpus with 506 English argumentative essays produced by Chinese undergraduates in disciplines related to science and engineering and a L1-English corpus with 207 argumentative essays written by L1-English undergraduates. The identified lexical bundles were analyzed both structurally and functionally. The findings suggest that L1-Chinese students used significantly more types and tokens of lexical bundle structures than L1-English students, and also employed all the three functional categories of bundles more frequently than L1-English students. In addition, L1-Chinese students’ writing was marked by a higher preference for clause-based bundles, which features the academic writing of lower-proficiency writers, and a wide use of conversational bundles (e.g. a lot of people), which implies their lack of awareness of academic register. The pedagogical implications are then provided regarding lexical bundles for ESL teachers.