Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research (아시아태평양코퍼스연구)

Institute for Corpus Research (국립인천대학교 코퍼스연구소)
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"I Agree with This": A Multi-Modal Register Analysis of Lexical Bundles in the ICNALE

  • Received : 2025.05.25
  • Accepted : 2025.08.17
  • Published : 2025.08.31
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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in lexical bundle use between the different registers of speaking and writing in a learner corpus. While various studies have examined multi-word items by foreign language learners, there is currently a lack of research on lexical bundle use in spoken corpora, particularly monologues. A comparative register analysis was designed to compare the lexical bundle output of L1 Japanese students of English in two corpora of argumentative written essays and spoken monologues, with two native speaker corpora being compared for reference. 4-word lexical bundles were extracted and analyzed through a Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) and categorized into two functional and structural taxonomies. Findings suggest bundle frequency decreases as proficiency level increases. Compositionally, it was found that both registers are structurally and functionally similar to each other, though the Japanese spoken monologue sub-corpus was the least varied. Furthermore, the use of prompt-specific language was found to be more influenced by register than L1 background, with both groups producing a significant amount of language that was dependent on the prompt. The register descriptions found in this study can inform pedagogical approaches to writing and monologue tasks.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Atsushi Mizumoto for assistance with the Generalized Linear Mixed Model.

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