Teaching lexical bundles in the disciplines: An example from a writing intensive history class

Researchers and instructors have been interested in the investigation and teaching of formulaic sequences for the past four decades. In academic writing, for example, these expressions are extremely frequent in the production of published authors in academic disciplines but rarely used by university students. The present study focused on the teaching of a special type of recurrent word combinations called lexical bundles to a group of university students in a writing-intensive history class. Pre- and post-instruction analyses were conducted on students’ class assignments in order to identify the use of these lexical bundles. In addition, alterative expressions used with functions similar to those of these bundles were analyzed in students’ final written production for the course. The findings of the study reflected no difference between pre- and post-instruction production of lexical bundles but they indicated an increase in students’ awareness of and interest in these expressions.