The use of lexical bundles in argumentative essays written by Turkish university students: A learner corpus-based study

The aim of the present study is to investigate four-word lexical bundles in argumentative essays written by L1 Turkish EFL students. For the purpose of the study, a specialized learner corpus was compiled named DPUCEL, which stands for Dumlupınar University Corpus of English Learners, with 152 preparatory students who will study in the departments of English Translation and Interpreting and English Language and Literature. The DPUCEL corpus includes argumentative essays which were written in Reading and Writing Skills Course as timed-essays during the 2019-2020 Fall Semester. In the first part of the analysis, timed-essays were transcribed by the researcher and four-word lexical bundles in the DPUCEL corpus were retrieved by using AntConc, a corpus software. In the second part, four-word lexical bundles in the timed-essays were classified manually both structurally and functionally based on the previously developed taxonomies. The results of the study revealed that the students used both original and prompt-specific bundles. It was found that the most frequently used structural category was verb phrase-based bundles and functional category was stance bundles. The lexical bundle research in non-native EFL writers' discourse provide understanding for further corpus-based investigation in academic writing.