Lexical Bundles in L1 and L2 Academic Writing
Yu-Hua Chen and Paul Baker studied frequently-used word combinations, known as lexical bundles, in L1 and L2 academic writing. They concluded that with the development of corpus techniques the importance of corpus-extracted lexical bundles are real sources of foundational language learning. For example, Chen and Baker found common lexical bundles such as "on the other hand(and)", "at the same time" or "that there is a/an". However, Chen and Baker lament that even with the growing interest in identifying phraseology with corpus tools during the past decade, it does not appear to have encouraged ELT publishers or practitioners to put more emphasis on computer-retrieved formulaic language in the curriculum and/or materials. The implication for vocabulary teachers is that an effective way to teach vocabulary during form-focused instruction is to concentrate on lexical bundles or collocations.