Lexical Bundles in L1 and L2 Academic Writing (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION "Phraseology" (Granger & Meunier, 2008; Meunier & Granger, 2007) and "formulaic sequences/language" (Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002, 2008) are two umbrella terms often used to refer to various types of multi-word units. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have made use of corpus data to add weight to the importance of multi-word units in language. For instance Altenberg (1998), in his exploration of the London-Lund Corpus, estimated that 80% of the words in the corpus formed part of recurrent word combinations. As Wray (2002, p. 9) observes, however, there is a "problem of terminology" when describing word co-occurrence. On the one hand, the same term might be used in different ways by different scholars; on the other hand, various terms are used to refer to similar or even the same notion of word co-occurrence. Some examples of such terms include clusters (Hyland, 2008a; Schmitt, Grandage & Adolphs, 2004; also used in the corpus tool WordSmith), recurrent word combinations (Altenberg, 1998; De Cock, 1998), phrasicon (De Cock, Granger, Leech, & McEnery, 1998), n-grams (Stubbs, 2007a, 2007b) and lexical bundles (e.g., Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Cortes, 2002). These terms--clusters, phrasicon, n-grams, recurrent word combinations, lexical bundles--actually refer to continuous word sequences retrieved by taking a corpus-driven approach with specified frequency and distribution criteria. The retrieved recurrent sequences are fixed multi-word units that have customary pragmatic and/or discourse functions, used and recognized by the speakers of a language within certain contexts. This methodology is considered to be a frequency-based approach for determining phraseology (see Granger & Paquot, 2008).