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Potential of L1 and L2 Corpora to Identify Target Lexical Bundles for Argumentative Essay Writing

  • Received : 2024.06.11
  • Accepted : 2024.08.10
  • Published : 2024.08.31

Abstract

This study aimed to identify target lexical bundles (e.g., on the other hand, at the same time) for argumentative essay writing and rank them in order of teaching priority for Japanese learners. Despite significant functional roles of lexical bundles in academic writing, the inclusion of lexical bundles in argumentative writing had been underexplored. Since argumentative writing skills help undergraduate students prepare for their academic careers (e.g., writing papers), the lexical bundles under this genre deserve more attention. This study first extracted 78 target bundles from L1 argumentative essay corpora (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English: ICNALE and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays: LOCNESS). The study then classified the bundles according to their discourse functions and semantic transparency to estimate the learnability for Japanese learners in L2 compatible corpora with the ICNALE. The results showed that learners had difficulty using the bundles with referential functions (e.g., in the form of) and semantic opaqueness (e.g., when it comes to), suggesting that the bundles in these two categories should be prioritized among the 78 bundles.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This study was supported by JST SPRING (grant number JPMJSP2150).

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