forms, functions and structures of lexical bundles in report writing

Lexical bundles are identified on the principle of distribution as they have a high frequency of occurrence and wide distribution across texts. they function as a) common discourse building blocks in a given register, and b) discourse frames to connect to new information (biber & barbieri, 2007). in addition, they serve the functions of being interactional devices for the involvement and engagement of the writer and target readers. this study intends to investigate the forms, functions, and structures of lexical bundles used in reports written by students from the disciplines of linguistics and nursing. to this end, 76 reports were extracted from micusp (the michigan corpus of upper-level student papers). to analyze the reports for the forms, functions and structures of the lexical bundles, salazar, (2014) taxonomy was used. 3-word, 4-word, and 5-word lexical bundles were found in the reports written by students from discipline of linguistics and nursing. as to the functions, students used the bundles to serve different functions, and the functions were different across two corpora. the results reported that the lexical bundles were realized using similar structures. based on the results, it could be concluded that the focus on lexical bundles and including them in teaching report writing seems to be necessary.