2021 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Formulaic Sequences in Academic English Writing: A Resource for Students and Teachers
Project/Area Number |
20K13143
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Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
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Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
Review Section |
Basic Section 02100:Foreign language education-related
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Research Institution | Waseda University |
Principal Investigator |
Appel Randy 早稲田大学, グローバルエデュケーションセンター, 講師(任期付) (10802043)
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Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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Keywords | Lexical Bundles / L2 English / Academic Writing / Proficiency differences |
Outline of Final Research Achievements |
67 and 85 lexical bundle (LB) types, as well as 2,595 and 3,072 tokens, were found in the Lower-Level Corpus (LLC) and Higher-Level Corpus (HLC). HLC writers were more frequent users of all LB lengths (types and tokens). When evaluated in terms of token counts, these differences were statistically significant. LLC writers used more LBs that overlapped with the provided prompt, indicating a greater dependence on the prompt for language used in their essays. Functional classifications indicated that HLC writers made statistically greater use of all major functional categories. Furthermore, LLC writers had a greater percentage of discourse-organizing structures, with HLC writers holding a slightly higher percentage of stance bundles. These results have been submitted for publication and are also being shared with teachers to help students better understand which structures to avoid/make greater use of in their academic English writing.
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Free Research Field |
Applied Linguistics
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Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements |
Results add to our growing understanding of the ways in which L2 English writers make use of multi-word structures in their writing. Given the limited amount of research in this area, these findings give important insights that indicate how multi-word structures relate to perceptions of proficiency.
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