A contrastive corpus-driven study of lexical bundles between English writers and Persian writers in psychology research articles

Knowledge of lexical bundles helps develop fluent linguistic production, forms the building blocks of academic discourse, and establishes membership in disciplinary communities. Given the significance of these recurrent word combinations in academic research writing, direct comparison between native-English and non-native-English writers in use of these expressions in writing research articles (RAs) may offer important insights into how they are used structurally and functionally. Building on this assumption, we contrastively examined the 4-, 5-, and 6-word lexical bundles in a 4,370,630-word corpus comprising RAs in psychology (RAP) divided into two sub-corpora: English corpus (EC) and Persian corpus (PC). Four hundred and sixteen (254 4-word, 115 5-word, and 47 6-word) and 316 (116 4-word, 104 5-word, and 96 6-word) lexical bundles were identified in EC and PC, respectively. Thirty-seven 4-word, 16 5-word, and 8 6-word lexical bundles were shared between EC and PC, respectively. The findings also showed that Persian writers employed fewer lexical bundles, using them structurally and functionally differently than did English writers. We discuss implications for genre-based instruction in English for academic writing for expert writers.