While a wealth of research is available on the frequent multi-word units in academic genres, studies that exclusively link lexical sequences to the rhetorical moves in research articles (RAs) are fairly limited. This study involved compiling a corpus of 8,500 RA abstracts sampled from five disciplines of economics, law, political sciences,…

The present study explores the under-researched area of collocation use with learners from different proficiency levels. The study investigates different types of collocations and the learners' elaboration of their collocation use. A total of 194 students from three different years of study in a Chinese university wrote compositions on the same…

This paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in Chinese students' academic writing across different levels of studies at an English medium university. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at four points of time between Year 1 and Year 4, and the structures and functions of the bundles were…

Lexical bundles, recurrent multiword combinations in a register, are extremely common and important discourse building blocks in academic writing. An increasing number of studies have investigated lexical bundles in academic writing in recent years, but few studies have explored L2 learners' interpretations of their own bundle production,…

This article describes the gathered experience in using corpora in an IELTS preparation course. The practice demonstrates an attempt to reduce negative washback effects occurring when preparation courses just concentrate on the test format neglecting the importance of development of learners' language skills and general study skills. Some…

Lack of knowledge in the conventional usage of collocations in one's respective field of expertise cause Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly different than more competent writing. This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost English as a Foreign language (EFL) readers and may have difficulties picking up on…