Effects of Teaching Lexical Bundles on EFL Students’ Abstract Genre Academic Writing Skills Improvement: Corpus-Based Research Design

Lexical bundles are two or more string of words that co-occur frequently in a corpus. Hence, this corpus-based research design study examines the effects of lexical bundles on English as a foreign language learner’s abstract genre academic writing skills, and it also investigates students’ perception towards lexical bundles instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Hence, frequent lexical bundles were selected from 70 computer science articles. These articles were selected from 7 journals that were published in reputable, indexed, and through representative criteria. Accordingly, sixteen frequent lexical bundles were selected through corpus analysis software (Laurence Anthony’s Antconc software) for the purpose of classroom instruction. The bundles are intended to help computer science students to develop their abstract genre academic writing skills. Students have instructed their academic writing through corpus informed instruction for two months, and the data were gathered through pre and post-tests and questionnaire. The findings indicated that lexical bundles have a positive effect on students’ academic writing skills, particularly abstract genre writing. Besides, the students have a positive perception of the lexical bundle and the instruction to enhance their academic writing skills. Finally, this research calls attention to discipline-oriented lexical bundles since they are crucial for academic writing.

Teaching the English article system: Definiteness and specificity in linguistically-informed instruction

Many explanations have been offered for the widely attested problems second language (L2) learners experience with the English article system. One influential proposal from formal linguistics is the Article Choice Parameter and associated Fluctuation Hypothesis, which states that learners of English fluctuate between correct and incorrect usage by sometimes selecting articles on the basis of definiteness (correct for English) and sometimes on the basis of specificity (correct for Samoan). The current study trialled new instruction materials which taught specificity then measured the outcome with low-intermediate first language Chinese learners of English ( n = 50). Results show that learners who were taught about specificity did not perform significantly better than learners who were taught about definiteness (using standard teaching materials) or learners who received no instruction on the English article system. The low proficiency of the learners and short intervention period likely contributed to their difficulty understanding the complexities of article meaning. Issues also arose when developing instructional materials which were both linguistically-accurate and sufficiently simple for learners of this level.