Učestali leksički spojevi u oblasti biotehnike u apstraktima studenata poljoprivrede na engleskom jeziku
Authors:   University of Belgrade, Faculty of Forestry, Lazić Katarina O. , Đorđević Danijela D. ,   University of Belgrade, Faculty of Agriculture
Published: July 2022

This paper deals with the identification and classification of lexical bundles that are commonly used in biotechnical texts in abstracts written by master’s degree students of the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade in English as a foreign language, more precisely English for Specific Purposes. Although in previous research lexical bundles of native Serbian speak- ers have been observed in the English texts of several biotechnical disciplines, this paper is the first research on the example of agriculture. The corpus researched within this paper consists of abstracts written by students of the Master’s degree programme of Agriculture (Modules: Field and Vegetable Crop Sciences, Horticulture, Soil and Water Management, Animal Science, Bio- technical and Information Engineering and Organic Agriculture) at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Belgrade, as part of pre-examination assignments in the course English language (compulsory subject, 5 lessons per week) in the first term of the academic year 2020/2021. The analyzed sample is a corpus of abstracts written by master’s degree students consisting of 10,667 words. The corpus was searched with the LancsBox software to find the lexical bundles of native English speakers that are commonly found in biotechnical texts. Previous research (Lazić 2017) identified the most commonly used lexical bundles in the texts of four biotechnical disciplines including forestry, wood processing, ecological engineering and landscape architecture, and identified the bundles with potentials for application in teaching. Once the lexical bundles were singled out in the texts of student abstracts from the field of agriculture, the use of the most common lexical bundles of biotechnical articles was analyzed. In addition, it was investigated to which groups of lexical bundles with the potential for application in foreign language teaching of biotechnical English they belong, which also indicated the insufficiently used groups of lexical bundles in the student abstracts. The results show that the priority groups for use in teaching are lexical bundles for hedging, the ones with the adverb likely, those that refer to tables and graphs, lexical bundles in the passive voice, as well as the group of functional taxonomy called lexical bundles oriented towards the participant. The limitation of this research is that it investigated a relatively small corpus of 10.667 words. It is concluded that the use of lexical bundles by agricul- tural students was influenced by the specifics of their discipline, the fact that the texts are written by students and not by affirmed authors, as well as by the fact that we investigated the writing of abstracts and not complete scientific articles. The pedagogical significance of this research can be seen in improving the teaching of English as a foreign language in the field of agriculture. In a broader sense, this study can be a possible contribution to the affirmation of researchers and scientists who write and publish papers in the English language in the field of agriculture.