Comparison of Lexical Bundles used by Turkish, Chinese, and American University Students

Appropriate and frequent use of lexical bundles plays an important role in competent English academic writing. Little information is known about how novice writers, both L1 and L2, make use of lexical bundles in their writing.This study investigated the use of lexical bundles in argumentative papers written by three groups of university writers:Turkish, Chinese, and Americans. The target lexical bundles in academic writing were extracted from a one- million word corpus from the magazine New York Times, and then the three groups of students’ papers were analyzed to examine how often these target bundles were used.