Features of lexical bundles across the introduction, method and results sections of business studies research articles

Lexical bundles are defined as a group of words that occur repeatedly together within the same register or genre and carry out specific functions. Lexical bundles are considered important building blocks of written academic discourse as they are prevalent in written registers. Due to their vital importance, they have been the focus of attention of research on academic written discourse over the last two decades. Although lexical bundles have been proven to be pervasive in academic written discourse, academic writers especially novice and L2 learners encounter difficulties when implementing lexical bundles in their writing particularly in discipline-specific academic writing. It is evident that lexical bundles play an instrumental role in shaping academic texts. Therefore, it is worth exploring the application of lexical bundles in academic texts particularly in a specific academic discipline. The current study adopts a corpus-based approach and examines the application of lexical bundles in business studies research articles published in high impact factor journals in this respective field. Subsequently, this study helps in the development of pedagogically useful list of lexical bundles in the field of business studies for academic writers. In the current study, the occurrence of lexical bundles within each section of the research article; the introduction, method and results sections in business studies research articles were identified and examined in terms of frequency, structure and function. Subsequently, the differences in the use of lexical bundles across these three sections were analysed. In order to explore these bundles, Business Studies Corpus (BSC) was developed. The BSC was compiled from 500 business research articles of high-impact international journals in the field of business studies. The BSC are composed of research articles across 5 main sub-disciplines; accounting, economics, finance, management and marketing. In order to extract target bundles from the BSC, AntConc 3.5.8 (Anthony, 2019) software was used. Moreover, two modified versions of analytical frameworks developed by Biber et al. (1999) and Hyland (2008a) were employed in the current study to classify bundles according to their structural and functional characteristics. The findings denote that the results section is the most densely formulaic part of the BSC, in terms of the type or token frequency of bundles. Variations in terms of the structure and functions of lexical bundles have been identified in each section of the research article. Differences in the distribution of various functional categories indicated the existence of a significant association between the discourse aims of a given section and the lexical bundles that are most typical of that part of the research article. The present study has pedagogical implications to EAP course designers and instructors to utilize the useful list of lexical bundles in the class and integrate them into the curricula. The results of the study are also beneficial for instructors in providing teaching materials to raise learners’ awareness of the appropriate use of the lexical bundles to achieve a style of academic writing useful for publishing in academic journals.

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