Short Research Papers

Selecting Lexical Bundles for Writing
CoursesDaniel Parsons
International University of Japan
Master’s degree students transitioning from reading textbooks to writing a thesis face alanguage gap of primarily instructional language to reporting language, but this gap is notwell known for economics, politics, and international relations fields. This study aims to
examine differences in lexical bundles between textbooks and research papers in these fields.
This report outlines a preliminary analysis carried out on stance lexical bundles which occur
much more frequently in research papers.

Lexical bundles play an important role in managing the discourse of academic
texts, but there is little information for practitioners about which specific lexicalbundles can best help students to write a master’s thesis. These bundles come inthree varieties: referential, stance, and meta-discursive (Biber, Conrad, & Cortes,
2004), though Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010) modified the categories to include
cause-effect and comparison bundles.
However, Cortes (2004) has shown that the English lexical bundles
students encounter in their academic reading do not make it into their academic
writing. This should not be surprising as Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard(2008) have shown that non-native speakers’ ability to process lexical bundles
accurately and fluently is dependent on the frequency with which such bundles
are encountered. Wulff (2019) explained that for acquisition of language tobegin, students require a great deal of input in the early stages, but as Wood andAppel (2014) have demonstrated, current English for Academic Purposes (EAP)
textbooks do not offer any pedagogical focus on lexical bundles. In addition,
one of the defining characteristics of lexical bundles is that they are evenly
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dispersed throughout a corpus with cut-off frequencies of 40 occurrences per
million words (Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004). This means that the bundles are
spread out across the millions of words in student textbooks, not all of which thestudents will read. Given this lack of salience, and given the important discursiverole played by lexical bundles, there is a need for teachers to know which lexicalbundles students need to focus on in a thesis writing course.
This study aims to explore the lexical bundles within the fields ofinternational development, international relations, politics, public management
and policy, and business, which represent the fields studied within the various
programs at International University of Japan (IUJ). Cortes (2013) listed
lexical bundles for a wide range of disciplines, but only for those occurring in
introductions, whereas Mizumoto, Hamatani, and Imao (2017) analyzed lexicalbundles used in all the sections of a corpus of research articles, but only in thefield of applied linguistics. Consequently, there is little knowledge about what
lexical bundles might be important to teach students in a thesis writing course
for the subjects at IUJ, where students are expected to read textbooks, research
papers, and eventually write their own thesis in English. The purpose of the study
is, therefore, to isolate those lexical bundles which students need to write their
thesis, and those lexical bundles that might be useful for students to read their
textbooks. To clarify, the research reported here focuses only on stance lexicalbundles which Biber, Johannsson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999) definedas those bundles which either attribute knowledge to other sources, hedge ideas,
or evaluate ideas.

Methods

To construct the corpus, six of IUJ’s international development program (IDP)
course textbooks were first scanned as PDF files, then converted in Adobe
Acrobat to text files through optical character recognition. The token count forthis corpus, according to AntConc (Anthony, 2019a) was 1.35 million. Similarly,
AntCorGen (Anthony, 2019b) was used to create the corpus of research papers.
The following fields were selected: development economics, economic models,macroeconomics, mathematical economics, and microeconomics. These fields
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collectively represent the core courses during the first year in the IDP, and thetoken count for this corpus was 1.9 million.
Stance lexical bundles were selected from two sources: The Academic
Formulas list (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) and The Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999). Biber et al. (1999) also reported
that certain nouns, such as fact and possibility can be used with prepositional
phrases and complement clauses to express stance. Examples include the fact thatand the possibility to. Stance noun lexical bundles were constructed based on thisinformation and added to the lists provided in the above two sources. In total, alist of 149 stance lexical bundles was created.
The list of stance lexical bundles was then subject to a test of salience.
Following Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010), a cut-off point was set at 10
occurrences per million. Any bundle that occurred at a relative frequency lower
than this in either corpora was excluded from further analysis. The second stageof the test was to calculate the ratio of the relative frequency in research papers to
the relative frequency in textbooks. A ratio higher than 2 indicated that a bundle
occurred more than twice as frequently in research papers in comparison to
textbooks. This, therefore, allowed the bundles to be ranked in accordance withhow much more frequently they occurred in papers as compared to textbooks.

Results

The test of salience described in the previous section revealed that of the 149
stance lexical bundles selected for this study, 64 were above the cut-off pointin either one or both of the corpora. In addition, 18 other bundles were below
the cut-off point in textbooks but present in research papers, while five bundles
were below the cutoff-point in papers but present in textbooks. The remaining
85 items were either below the cut-off point in both corpora, or did not occur ineither corpora. Table 1 shows those bundles which occurred in only one of thetwo corpora; Table 2 ranks those bundles which were more salient in papers; andTable 3 ranks those bundles which were more salient in the textbooks.

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Lexical Bundles for Writing Courses, OCJSI 2, pages 42-53
Table 1
Stance Lexical Bundles That Occur Above the Cut-Off Point Only One Corpus
Bundles

Corpushave shown thatbe explained bybeen shown to
can be considered
be seen as
be considered asimportant role in
the notion of
it is clear thatit should be noted
it has been shown
it can be seen
it should be noted that
it is not possible
it has been shown thatat least in
it is not possible tothe tendency to

Occur above the cut-off point only in the
corpus of research papers. Either below the
cut-off point or do not occur in the corpus of
textbooks.

we have seen
it was found thatthe sense thatit can be shown that

Occur above the cut-off point only in the
corpus of textbooks. Either below the cut-off
point or do not occur in the corpus of papers.

Table 2
Stance Lexical Bundles Occurring More Frequently in Research Papers and Ranked According toRatio of Frequency in Papers to Frequency in Textbooks

Stance lexical bundles

Ratio of Papers Relative
Frequency to Textbooks
Relative Frequency

is consistent with

5.01

appears to be

3.40

the importance of

2.46

Comments
Occur more than twice as frequently
in research papers than textbooks.

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Parsons

Stance lexical bundles

Ratio of Papers Relative
Frequency to Textbooks
Relative Frequency

more likely to be

2.33

less likely to

2.10

it is difficult to

2.07

are likely to

1.91

it is possible that1.68

it is necessary to

1.57

it is worth

1.55

the fact that

1.48

the possibility that

1.42

it is possible to

1.37

may not be

1.36

according to the

1.33

be regarded as

1.32

the most important

1.32

it appears that

1.29

to some extent

1.27

is likely to be

1.27

the idea that

1.14

it is important to

1.09

Comments

Occur slightly more frequently inresearch papers than textbooks.

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Lexical Bundles for Writing Courses, OCJSI 2, pages 42-53
Table 3
Stance Lexical Bundles Occurring More Frequently in Textbooks and Ranked According to Ratio of
Frequency in Papers to Frequency in Textbooks

Stance lexical bundles

Ratio of Papers Relative
Frequency to Textbooks
Relative Frequency

the possibility of

0.98

be the case

0.92

assumed to be

0.91

the assumption that

0.91

there may be

0.89

it is likely that0.84

we assume that0.73

the problem of

0.70

the idea of

0.65

to show that

0.63

it may be

0.60

the hypothesis that

0.57

we can see

0.52

the assumption of

0.44

as a whole

0.43

if they are

0.42

assume that the0.40

it is easy to

0.29

is determined by

0.26

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Comments
Occur slightly more
frequently in textbooks thanresearch papers.

Occur more than twice as
frequently in textbooks thanresearch papers.

Parsons

Discussion

It is interesting to note that the phrase it can be shown that is much more
prominent (in terms of frequency) in textbooks, whereas have shown that is much
more prominent in research papers. This justifies the comparative methodology
chosen here, as it allows the language to be selected with more focus for the
specific language course being designed. A thesis writing course would certainly
need to focus on the top 18 lexical bundles.
Analysis of the concordance lines reveals further pedagogically valuable
features of these lexical bundles that could be useful for instructors to know. Due
to limitations of space only a few are outlined here. For example, been shown to
was often used with citations in the introductions of research papers, where it
usually refers to established facts from previous research, such as: “nighttime
lights have also been shown to be a good predictor of local wealth as measured
by the DHS wealth index” (Bruederle & Hodler, 2018, p. 2). This function isespecially unnecessary in textbooks which are instructional in nature. Similarly,
can be considered was used frequently in results and discussion sections where they
are used to attribute a quality to the data, thus helping to evaluate the data. For
example, “the results obtained can be considered to be robust” (Meier et al., 2015,
p. 16), and “From the results of our study, we hypothesize that the organization ofcentres can be considered a valuable economic resource for metropolitan areas”(Khaili-Miab, van Strien, Axhausen & Grêt-Regamey, 2019, p.13). In addition,
the bundle important role in was frequently used in introductions to establish therelationship between the research context and the research topic. For example,“Many studies have shown that entrepreneurship plays an important role instimulating economic growth” (Naminse & Zhuang, 2018, p. 2). Examining thewider context of this concordance line reveals that stimulating economic growthrefers to the context of poverty, and entrepreneurship was the topic of the whole
paper.
The bundle it is important to occurred in the introductions to research papers
and appeared to have two main functions. The first was to help distinguishbetween two ideas or to narrow the focus of an idea to be more specific, as in “itis important to recognize improvements in gentrified neighborhoods may not be48

Lexical Bundles for Writing Courses, OCJSI 2, pages 42-53

associated with city-wide health inequalities” (Gibbons, Barton & Brault, 2018,p. 3) The second function was to provide a specific context that rationalizes theresearch, as in “It is important to ensure that health systems are responsive towomen’s and men’s needs yet this requires a robust evidence base” (Hosseinpoor
et al., 2012, p. 1). In the methodology section, this bundle is used to explain anecessary aspect of the methodology, as in “Therefore, it is important to use
appropriate weights to make the estimates representative and comparable over
the two survey rounds” (Pathak, Singh & Subramanian, 2010, p. 4). This bundle
occurs most frequently in the results and discussion sections and appears toprovide some evaluation of some aspect of the methodology, as in “However,
it is important to note that there was limited variation in the types of satellite
data used in the studies” (Seto, Fragkias, Günerlap & Reilly, 2011, p. 8). This canalso include mentioning limitations. The use of this bundle in the results anddiscussion section also includes reiterating the rationale of the research.

Conclusion

As can be seen, ranking lexical bundles according to the ratio of relative frequencies
facilitates the extraction of salient lexical bundles. They are salient due to the factthat they play a critical role in managing the typical discourse features of theresearch paper. They can therefore be selected to be taught to students in their
thesis writing courses through the specific functions that they have.
There are, however, a number of limitations to this study. First, the current
corpora only represent one program within the university, whereas the thesis
writing course caters for all students. Additionally, selecting lexical bundles frompre-determined lists limits the scope of the study since it is possible that these
corpora contain other lexical bundles in the same categories. Finally, the analysisof the concordance lines has only been carried out by this researcher. A second
rater would improve the reliability of the interpretations.
One dimension that remains unexplored in this research is the situation
where lexical bundles may have a higher (e.g., the fact that) or lower frequency(e.g., the possibility that) simultaneously in both corpora and what impact thiscan have for selecting items for a thesis writing syllabus. Going forward, the49Parsons

corpora will continue to grow, lexical bundles will be identified directly from thecorpora, and the analyses that inform the curriculum will also continue. Software
written in R is being developed to help identify lexical bundles more quickly, andthis is due to be completed during 2020.

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Hosseinpoor, A. R., Stewart Williams, J., Amin, A., Araujo de Carvalho, A.,
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Author Bio

Daniel Parsons teaches English for Academic Purposes to master’s degree students
of international relations and business at IUJ. His primary research interest is in
corpus linguistics. <dparsons@iuj.ac.jp>
Received: October 20, 2019
Accepted: September 9, 2020

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Appendix
Textbook corpus
Bradley, T., & Patton, P. (2002). Essential mathematics for economics andbusiness. (2nd ed.). Wiley.
Gans, J., King, S., Stonecash, R., Byford, M., Libich, J., & Mankiw, N. G.
(2015). Principles of Economics. (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Mankiw, N. G. (2010). Macroeconomics. (7th ed.). Worth Publishers
Newbold, P., Carlson, W. L., & Thorne, B. M. (2013). Statistics for business andeconomics. (8th ed.). Pearson.
Varian, H. R. (2006). Intermediate microeconomics: A modern approach (7th ed.:International student edition). W. W. Norton & Company.
Wooldridge, J. M. (2013). Introductory econometrics: A modern approach (5thed.). South-Western Cengage Learning.

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