DefinePK

Abstract

Lexical bundles are crucial components as well as building blocks in academic discourse. Students’ conception of academic discourse can be successfully improved with the right application of the lexical bundles.  Lexical bundles are not examined in Pakistan and students may struggle to understand the content, charts, diagrams, figures as well as the crafts provided in the written discourse of IELTS books. Additionally, students face difficulties while speaking in the IELTS’ exam because they are focusing only on grammar and vocabulary rather than lexical bundles. Whereas, native speakers of language rely on lexical bundles. Thus, the purpose of this corpus-based study is to explore four-words LBs and their discourse functions employed in 10 IELTS books. To identify and extract such bundles a specialized corpus of these textbooks was created and uploaded on AntConc software. The size of corpus was 390548. After manual filtration 104 bundles were categorized using Biber et al. (2004) functional taxonomies of LBs. Moreover, the research study identified some new functions of lexical bundles, which have been added to the functional taxonomy proposed by Biber et al. (2004). Additionally, this research has contributed to the field of corpus linguistics and lexical bundle analysis. The findings of the study showed that Discourse Organizers and Referential Expressions were frequently used bundles in the corpus. The results pertaining common word-strings have important educational ramifications for syllabus designers, language material creators, and teachers. The list provided by this research study can significantly improve students’ speaking, academic writing and comprehension of the text.