Lexical Bundle Use by Thai Undergraduate Learners of English
Open Access
- Author:
- Leelasetakul, Mathurin
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 07, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Xiaofei Lu, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Xiaofei Lu, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Suresh Canagarajah, Committee Member
Ning Yu, Committee Member
Matthew Edward Poehner, Outside Member - Keywords:
- lexical bundles
writing
corpus
corpus lingusitcs
Thai learners of English - Abstract:
- This present study explores the use of lexical bundles in the writings of Thai undergraduate learners of English. The study uses a Thai learners’ corpus, TULE2014, compiled from writing assignments and tests of two levels of undergraduate students: first-year students enrolled in a freshman English course (Freshman English group) and third- to fourth-year students in an advanced writing course (English Composition group). The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part explores the use of frequent 4-word lexical bundles by both groups using the frequency-based approach and the structural and functional categories from Biber et al. (2004). The first analysis reveals that the students in the novice Freshman English subcorpus used more lexical bundle types and tokens than the expert students in the Composition subcorpus. The Freshman English students also used more lexical bundles that are not originally-produced than their Composition counterparts. The second part of the analysis uses the Academic Formula List (AFL) from Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) as target bundles and examined the use of those target bundles in the learner corpus. The result shows that the Freshman English group used fewer AFL bundles than the Composition group. The Freshman English group also used more spoken bundles than written ones and the Composition group used more written than spoken bundles in their writing. The analysis provides insights into the changes that can be made to the class materials and class discussion in order to address the issues identified.