Bundles in advanced EAL authors’ articles: How do they compare with world Englishes practices?

Abstract

With increasing numbers of scholars from around the world now engaged in international publishing to further their careers, many authors for whom English is not their first language worry about the acceptability of their language to journal editors. In this article we explore this issue by focusing on a key component of fluent academic writing: the high frequency fixed-word collocations known as lexical bundles, strings which are ‘glued together’ and help characterize smooth production. Here we compare their use in the pre-submission drafts of authors with different first languages with published papers in leading international journals. Our results suggest that language background certainly contributes to the differences between our EAL texts and published papers, but that seniority and discipline also significantly impact these language choices.