Lexical Bundles in Professional and Student Writing

This work involves the research of lexical bundles, sequences of three or more words likely to co-occur in a register, or situational variety of English. Bundles vary by register. The research in grounded in the study of a corpus, a collection of texts. Essays written by both professional and student writers were analyzed for four-word bundles to determine how bundles might vary. Student essays were categorized by writing level, determined by the exam for which the students were writing the essays. Results suggest that both professional writers and student writers use bundles more associated with the academic than the conversational register and that both professional writers as well as the college proficient writers, those scoring higher on the exam, were more likely to use bundles to structure discourse than nonproficient writers. Results also indicate that the proficient college writers were more likely to quote and paraphrase the source material than the nonproficient college writers. Findings are limited due to the small corpora size. Included are implications for instruction and further research.