Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers

Lexical bundles – recurrent sequences of words – are important building blocks of discourse in spoken and written registers. Previous research has shown that lexical bundles are especially prevalent in university classroom teaching, where they serve three major discourse functions: stance expressions, discourse organizers, and referential expressions.The present study extends this line of research by investigating the use of lexical bundles in a wide range of spoken and written university registers, including both instructional registers and student advising/management registers (e.g., office hours, class management talk, written syllabi, etc.). The findings show that lexical bundles are even more prevalent in non-academic university registers than they are in the core instructional registers. Most surprisingly, lexical bundles are very common in written course management (e.g., course syllabi), in contrast to previous research which showed bundles to be much more common in speech than in writing.