From Do You Know to I Don’t Know: An Analysis of the Frequency and Usefulness of Lexical Bundles in Five English Language Self-Study Books

Abstract

Knowing which phrases to use in everyday situations is a key part of communicating effectively in English, and increasingly language learning materials are expected to reflect this. This paper presents a corpus analysis of five contemporary self-study books for English language learners, to identify common phrases taught, assess their form and function, and evaluate them against a baseline of lexical bundles (i.e. recurring sequences of words) used in social situations by users of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Self-study textbooks aim to equip the learner with enough English to function appropriately in a range of different contexts; they usually present language in the form of dialogues in common everyday situations, often supplemented with exercises, grammar explanations and glossaries. While they may differ in pedagogical approach, it could be anticipated that the lexical bundles found would be broadly similar. However, analysis of this corpus showed a lack of consistency both in the form and number of bundles found in the different publications. Furthermore, comparison with a corpus of ELF conversations extracted from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE, version 2.0 XML) (2013) highlighted the underrepresentation of lexical bundles with certain pragmatic functions, such as hedges/stance expressions (I don’t know, I think) and vague language (a little bit).