Lexical bundles in the academic writing of the Arts and Humanities: From corpus to CALL

Abstract

Lexical bundles are highly frequent and functionally significant in written academic discourse. Many studies have explored lexical bundles through a disciplinary lens, but their findings are not typically incorporated into published L2 teaching-learning materials. As a result, there are a number of challenges facing teachers who want to include a focus on disciplinary lexical bundles in their academic writing instruction at tertiary level. This paper describes a method for deriving a functional list of disciplinary lexical bundles from a corpus of academic writing, and then discusses the results quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings suggest that a small number of bundles (n=47) occur across genres, levels and institutions in the academic writing of the Arts and Humanities disciplines. Finally, a series of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) resources are presented, including a tool for finding the bundles in academic texts. The functional list and resources will be of interest to those involved in the teaching-learning of academic writing in the Arts and Humanities disciplines.