Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

Teaching lexical bundles in the disciplines: An example

from a writing intensive history class
Viviana Cortes ∗
Department of English, 203 Ross Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA

Abstract
Researchers and instructors have been interested in the investigation and teaching of formulaic sequences
for the past four decades. In academic writing, for example, these expressions are extremely frequent in the
production of published authors in academic disciplines but rarely used by university students. The present
study focused on the teaching of a special type of recurrent word combinations called lexical bundles to
a group of university students in a writing-intensive history class. Pre- and post-instruction analyses were
conducted on students’ class assignments in order to identify the use of these lexical bundles. In addition,
alterative expressions used with functions similar to those of these bundles were analyzed in students’ final
written production for the course. The findings of the study reflected no difference between pre- and post-
instruction production of lexical bundles but they indicated an increase in students’ awareness of and interest
in these expressions.
© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Formulaic sequences; Lexical bundles; Academic writing

1. Introduction

Recurrent word combinations or formulaic sequences constitute a large portion of discourse

(Schmitt & Carter, 2004). Erman and Warren (2000) reported that different types of word combina-
tions made up 58.6% of the spoken corpus analyzed in their study and 52.3% of the written corpus.
Although the high frequency of use of these expressions is an issue to be seriously taken into
account, it is important to stress that the use of recurring word combinations has been considered a
sign of proficient language use of particular registers, including academic writing (Bamber, 1983;
McCully, 1985). Several functions of the use of formulaic sequences can be closely connected to

∗ Tel.: +1 515 294 6690; fax: +1 515 294 6814.

E-mail address: viviana@iastate.edu.

0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.linged.2007.02.001
392 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

the academic writing context. Wray (2002) affirmed that formulaic sequences allow language users
to express identity with a group, such as a disciplinary community, and the use of these expressions
diminishes reading or listening effort. Furthermore, Haswell (1991) stated that the use of recurrent
fixed expressions reflects a certain maturity in writing while, on the other hand, the lack of these
expressions is a marker of novice writers. Cortes (2004) explained that the frequent use of fixed
expressions “seems to signal competent language use within a register to the point that learning
conventions of register use may in part consist in learning how to use certain fixed phrases” (p. 398).
These claims have been analyzed in the study of a particular type of frequently occurring word
combinations called lexical bundles (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finnegan, 1999; Biber
& Conrad, 1999). Lexical bundles are combinations of three or more words which are identified
empirically in a corpus of natural language. Some examples of lexical bundles are expressions
such as take a look at, I don’t know, on the other hand, and as a result of, among many others.
Compared to other types of frequently occurring word combinations, lexical bundles are identified
empirically rather than perceptually in a language corpus. A specially designed computer program
runs through a collection of texts and identifies groups of three or more words that co-occur
frequently.
Biber and Conrad (1999) affirmed that as these word combinations “are so common, it might be
assumed that lexical bundles are simple expressions, and that they will therefore be acquired eas-
ily” (p.188). The acquisition and appropriate use of these expressions, however, does not seem to
be a natural process, in spite of the relevant role that lexical bundles play in certain registers. Lex-
ical bundles are very frequently used in published academic writing and are also discipline-bound
(Cortes, Jones, & Stoller, 2002), which contributes to show that each discipline has different pur-
poses or ways of seeing the world associated with distinct communicative conventions (Hayland
& Hamp-Lyons, 2002).
Lexical bundles are far from being simple expressions, and they have been shown to be rarely
used by students. Following the contrastive corpus-based methodology used by Conrad (1996)
to investigate the differences between professional and novice writers, Cortes (2004) conducted
a study in which she compared the frequency and function of lexical bundles in the written pro-
duction of published authors and student writing in history and biology. While these expressions
were extremely frequent in the corpora of published articles from well-known American journals
in those disciplines, the use of these expressions by the students in this study, who were all native
speakers of English at different university levels, was extremely rare. Her study confirmed that
these expressions are not acquired naturally, as even graduate students’ written production showed
rare occurrences of lexical bundles. Exposure to the use of lexical bundles in reading materials
did not transfer directly into students’ active production of lexical bundles in writing. In addition,
on the rare occasions in which students used lexical bundles, the functions they tried to convey
by using these expressions were different from those identified in the use of bundles by published
writers. Cortes suggested that a possible reason for this difference in use might be the lack of formal
instruction that students in the disciplines have on the frequency and function of these expressions.
Many studies have suggested different ways of introducing students to the use of frequently
occurring word combinations. Lewis (2000a) presents an edited volume with many innovative
ways of teaching collocations. There are very few studies, however, that have focused on the
results yielded by the teaching of lexical bundles or formulaic sequences. In their study of the
teaching of certain formulaic sequences to non-native speakers taking English for Academic
Purposes (EAP) classes, Jones and Haywood (2004) reported modest gains in the production
of formulaic language after a 10-week instruction period. They maintained that in the case of
university students taking EAP classes, the use of formulaic sequences can help these students
 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 393

to express technically complex ideas in an economical way, to mark different stages in their
discourse, and to show the necessary level of formality. These authors also emphasized that the
absence of these expressions in students’ academic writing may result in inadequate writing.
The study presented here relates to Jones and Haywood’s but focuses on the use of lexical
bundles in the disciplinary writing of native speakers of English. This study investigated the
written production of novice history writers in order to compare the use of structurally complex
lexical bundles and the use of more structurally simple expressions (e.g., referential expressions,
simple sentence or phrase connectors, etc.). Many of the simple expressions analyzed in this
study (such as so, but, after all, and consequently) have been considered discourse connectors,
discourse operators, discourse particles, or discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987; Redecker, 1990;
Fraser, 1999) because they are used to indicate the relationship between an utterance and the
preceding discourse (Levinson, 1983). These expressions, however, have often been connected
to everyday conversation and not to academic prose. Schleppegrell (1996) maintains that in order
to succeed in academic contexts, students who are non-native speakers of English need to master
the linguistic conventions of academic genres and they need to become aware of the way written
language is structured when compared to spoken language. There is no doubt that her statement
can also be applied to novice writers who are native speakers of English. “Knowing how to segment
and structure written texts, and how to introduce examples in ways expected in writing, is part of
the difference in register that needs to be acquired by developing academic writers” (p. 280).
The purpose of the present article is to report the methodology and findings of a study that
focused on the teaching of certain lexical bundles (called target bundles) in a writing-intensive
history class for third and fourth year university students, all native speakers of English, and on
the analysis of simple expressions favored by students instead of lexical bundles. The following
research questions served as a guide in the study:

a. Did students frequently use any of the target bundles (lexical bundles that recur in published
history writing) prior to instruction?
b. Did the frequency of use of the target bundles increase after instruction?
c. What words or expressions did students frequently use in their writing to convey some of the
functions conveyed by the target bundles? Are these expressions frequently used by published
authors in history?

2. The study

The present study was divided into three stages. First, a corpus of research articles from journals
of American History was collected for this research. The most frequent four-word lexical bundles
in that corpus were identified and classified according to their functions. Next, the same bundles
were analyzed in the written production of a group of students in a writing intensive history class.
The second stage consisted of planning and teaching the target bundles to the students in that class.
The third stage focused on the analysis of the use of these target bundles and other functionally
equivalent expressions in the written production of the students in the class and in the corpus of
published articles. Each of these stages is described in detail in the following sections.

2.1. Stage one: lexical bundles and target bundles. Data collection and data analysis

Biber et al. (1999) defined lexical bundles as “sequences of word forms that commonly go
together in natural discourse” (p. 990). Lexical bundles are combinations of three or more words
394 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

Table 1
Target bundles classified functionally
Discourse organizers Topic elaboration/clarification and on the other on the one hand
as well as the on the other hand
as well as the that led to the
Referential expressions Indication/focus some of the most one of the major
one of the most to that of the
Quantity specification as part of the
as part of a
Intangible framing attributes as a matter of in the mind of
as a result of in the name of
from the perspective of in the words of
in the context of on the basis of
in the case of to the extent that
in the course of the extent to which
in the eyes of the role of the
in the face of the nature of the
in the hands of
Time reference at the same time by the end of
at the turn of in the age of
Multi-functional reference at the end of at the beginning of

that frequently co-occur in a register. They are identified empirically by means of a computer
program that works on a corpus of language texts. Even though lexical bundles are combi-
nations of three or more words, the present study focused only on four-word lexical bundles,
drawing on previous studies on the use of these expressions in academic writing and in his-
tory writing in particular. It must be emphasized that lexical bundles are defined by frequency:
to be considered a lexical bundle, a four-word combination must repeat at least 20 times in
a million words, and it must also recur in five or more texts, to avoid users’ idiosyncratic
tendencies.
For the present study, four-word lexical bundles were identified on an approximately 800,000-
word corpus made up of journal articles from American Historical Review and the Journal of
American History. These journals were chosen because many of the articles published in them
were part of the reading assignments of the writing-intensive course and other courses students
in the class were taking at that time. The corpus collected served as data to be analyzed by means
of a specially designed computer program, which yielded a group of 35 bundles, which met the
frequency cut-off point previously mentioned after being normalized to a million words (Biber,
Conrad, & Reppen, 1998). These bundles were considered the target bundles which would form
the basis of the materials design and teaching of the mini-lessons taught in the writing intensive
history class. Target bundles were classified functionally in context using a taxonomy previously
developed (Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2003, 2004; Cortes, 2004). Table 1 presents a list of the
target bundles selected for this study in their functional categories.

2.2. Stage two: mini-lessons design and teaching materials

The idea of teaching lexical bundles in a disciplinary class evolved from the collaboration of
a history professor and the author. The present study took place at a mid-size university in the
Southwest of the United States.
 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 395

The history professor considered that his writing-intensive class, History 300, would be a
good place to teach lexical bundles. History 300, Topics in History, is a class that covers a variety
of regional and thematic topics in European, Latin American, and North American history for
junior and senior students. In addition, the course includes specific instruction in history writing.
These writing-intensive classes are seminar-style classes. The reduced number of students allows
instructors to help students to focus on History writing conventions and to provide appropriate
and frequent feedback to their writing. The history professor invited the author to come to his
class on a regular basis to introduce the use of lexical bundles to students in this writing intensive
class. For this purpose, the author designed five 20-minute micro-lessons that would be deliv-
ered at five different times in the semester, approximately once every 2 weeks in a period of
10 weeks. All the students in the class were native speakers of English, junior or senior history
majors. In general, students register for these writing-intensive classes because they are interested
in learning more about the conventions of history writing and in order to polish up their aca-
demic writing skills. In this particular section of History 300, students were expected to produce
various papers throughout the semester instead of taking tests or submitting only a final written
report.
The class was made up of twelve students, but only eight agreed to participate and provide their
written production for analysis, by signing consent forms approved by the Institutional Review
Board at the university. The history professor was always present in each of the micro-lessons,
providing support for claims presented by the English instructor in the use and function of certain
lexical bundles frequently occurring in published history writing.
On the first meeting with the students in the history class, the English instructor explained
the project to the students and took some time to describe and illustrate what lexical bundles
are and how often they are used by published authors in history. On the second, third, and
fourth micro-lessons, all students in the class worked on exercises provided by the English
instructor. In these lessons, a group of functionally related target bundles were introduced to
students in contextualized examples taken from the corpus of history journal articles or from
a corpus of student writing in history collected for another study by the instructor. Students
worked in pairs analyzing functions and possible uses of these expressions. The micro-lessons
usually finished with some application exercise of the type of filling in the blanks, multiple
choice (with examples taken from the published writing corpus), or inappropriate use correction
(frequently this inappropriate use examples came from the student writing corpus previously
mentioned). These types of exercises have been widely used in the language teaching field for
the teaching of collocations (Conzett, 2000; Hill, Lewis, & Lewis, 2000; Lewis, 2000b). Stu-
dents provided their answers in an informal manner and possible answers were discussed by
the class and instructor as a group. Appendix A shows some examples of the exercises fre-
quently completed in class. It is important to mention that even though the use of these methods
for the teaching of vocabulary and collocations has been widely advocated, there is no spe-
cific research on how well they work. These methods are mainly directed towards making
students consciously notice these language features, which may facilitate acquisition (Lewis,
2000a, 2000b).
The final micro-lesson was a rounding-up class, in which the importance of the use of lexical
bundles was further discussed. Students engaged in a paraphrasing activity, in which they needed
to decide what the use of a certain bundle would provide to a bundle-free passage, focusing on
the particular function that the author was trying to convey. The instructor also took advantage of
this informal discussion to survey the reaction of students to these micro-lessons in general and
to the use of lexical bundles in their writing in particular.
396 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

Table 2
Student writing
Total number of papers 18 (8 + 5 + 5)
Average length of paper and range 1794 (700, 2773)
Type of papers Response papers
Topics Origin of the Cold War
Social movements of the 60’s

2.3. Stage three: target bundles and functionally equivalent expressions in student writing

The written samples collected for the analysis of the use of target bundles in student production
consisted of response papers that students were asked to hand in, elaborating on topics analyzed
in their history class. Table 2 shows some descriptive information on these papers. Writing assign-
ments for History 300 covered various topics related to the origins of the Cold War and social
movements of the 60s. Out of five assigned essays, three sets of response papers were collected for
the linguistic investigation. The first set was produced by students before the first micro-lesson.
All eight students in the study completed and submitted papers for this stage. The second set was
handed in after micro-lesson three, and the final set was collected before the end of the semester,
after micro-lesson five. For these last two sets, only five out of the eight students participating
in the study submitted their papers. In all cases, papers were sent electronically to the English
instructor with the exception of the papers produced by one student, which were translated into
machine-readable text by the instructor.
The use of target bundles in student production was identified by means of a concordancing
program,1 Monoconc Pro (Barlow, 2000) for each set of papers. Then, student papers were man-
ually scanned and analyzed for the use of words or expressions that related functionally to those
target bundles presented and discussed in the history class. These expressions were later identified
using the same concordancing program in the corpus of published writing and their normalized
frequencies in such texts were computed. The statistical procedure used in order to adjust raw
frequency counts from corpora of different sizes to conduct a reliable comparison is called nor-
malization (Biber et al., 1998). The raw frequency is divided by the number of words in the corpus
and then multiplied by the number selected for norming, which in the present study was 1,000,000.

3. Results and discussion

As shown in Table 3, 13 out of the 35 target bundles selected for this study had been used by
students prior to instruction as yielded by the analysis of the written production in set one. In
several cases, a bundle was used only once by a single student in a paper or more than once by
the same student on a single paper, as in the case of one of the most, which was used four times in
the same paper. Table 3 also reflects that there was no major improvement in the frequency and
variety of bundle use after instruction. Eleven target bundles were identified in set two, this time
used only once in each paper. Similarly, the analysis of set three showed that only 14 bundles
were used by students. From all the functions performed by the bundles selected for this study,
students seemed to make more varied use of those that indicate intangible framing attributes in

1 A concordancer is a computer program that analyzes text and helps identify words and expressions in context, providing

the frequency in which they occurred in a given collection of texts.

 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 397

Table 3
Target bundles and their frequencies in student writing before and after instruction (grouped by function)
Target bundles grouped by function Set 1 (before Set 2 (after Set 3 (after all
instruction) micro-lesson 3) micro-lessons)

Discourse organizers
Topic elaboration
and on the other 0 0 0
as well as a 1 0 0
as well as the 2 1 2
on the one hand 3 0 0
that led to the 2 0 0
Referential expressions
Indication/focus
one of the major 0 0 0
one of the most 5 1 1
some of the most 0 0 0
to that of the 0 0 0
Quantity specification
as part of a 0 0 0
as part of the 0 0 0
Intangible framing attribute
as a matter of 0 1 0
as a result of 0 1 2
from the perspective of 1 0 1
in the context of 1 0 0
in the case of 1 0 0
in the course of 0 0 0
in the eyes of 1 1 1
in the face of 0 1 2
in the hands of 2 0 1
in the mind of 0 0 0
in the name of 1 0 1
in the words of 0 0 0
on the basis of 0 0 0
to the extent that 0 0 1
the extent to which 0 1 0
the nature of the 0 0 0
the role of the 0 1 1
Time reference
as the same time 3 1 1
at the turn of 0 1 1
in the age of 0 0 0
Multi functional reference
at the beginning of 5 0 0
at the end of 0 0 0

the papers from sets 2 and 3, that is, after instruction. For example, the lexical bundles as a
result of and the extent to which had never been used before these expressions were formally
introduced to students in the micro-lessons. Two instances of as a result of and one of the extent
to which were identified in the last set of papers produced by students, as shown in the following
examples:
398 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

Postmodern historiography created a new view of history that advocates the recognition of
the marginalized and unsung heroes. As a result of this effort, the questioning and criticism
of traditional heroes gained popularity as a constituent of historiography.
Davies attributes this shift to the fact that such, an orientation is “colorblind,” pointing to
the resentment that had developed as a result of the racial component of the Great Society,
particularly in light of growing black militancy.
The extent to which labor had removed itself from its earlier mission of wealth and power
redistribution and transformed concern for social welfare into an “interest group” issue,
albeit a powerful one in Democratic Party, is evidenced by its 11 total-disinterest“in the
War on Poverty.
It is not difficult to notice, however, that student production of target bundles continued to be
rare and uneven, even after all five micro-lessons had taken place. Target bundles that had been
used prior to instruction (such as in the context of or in the case of) were not used again by any
student in the class after instruction.
As previously mentioned, at the end of micro-lesson 5, the author conducted a general review of
the use of lexical bundles and asked students several questions regarding their awareness of the use
of the expressions in history writing. In addition, the author invited students to contact her in person
or through e-mail, if they wanted to add any further comments on the subject. Even though the
informal discussion and several e-mails received by the instructor reflected that students perceived
that these lessons had raised their awareness toward the use, frequency, and function of lexical
bundles in published writing, and that they regarded target bundles as tools that could provide their
writing with certain published writing sophistication when trying to convey different language
functions, the frequency of their use did not increase significantly in students’ writing samples.
In this informal discussion, several students reported they paid more attention to functions and
the target bundles related to them not only in their writing (for which they had developed certain
strategies of their own, such as having a list of bundles and their corresponding functions at hand
when they were writing their history papers) but also while reading class materials.
Addressing the first two questions proposed in the introduction to this paper, it can be concluded
that student use of target bundles in their writing reports for this history class before and after
instruction was extremely rare. This finding matches to a certain extent the results of the study
conducted by Jones and Haywood (2004). The students in their study (who were all non-native
speakers of English, university students enrolled in an EAP2 class, instructed on the use of certain
word combinations during a 10-week period) only showed minor gains in the production of these
expressions after instruction. Despite the fact that the students in their study were non-native
speakers and that that might be a reason to believe that their small gains were due to language
learning issues, the native speakers in the present study did not seem to learn these expressions
better or any faster. The results of interviews conducted by these researchers, however, showed
high motivation and predisposition towards the use of these expressions by the participants in
their study.
The analysis of student papers in search of alternative words or expressions used to convey
bundle-related functions yielded a wide variety of expressions, such as discourse organizers and

2 EAP (English for Academic Purposes). The purpose of EAP classes is to help students who are non-native speakers

of English develop their academic language skills, that is, the use of English to complete academic tasks such as writing
research papers, making oral presentations and taking part in argumentative debates, among others.
 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 399

Table 4
Alternative expressions identified in student writing and their raw frequencies
Word or expression Students’ production Students’ production Published authors’ production
(raw frequency) (normalized frequency) (normalized frequency)

After all 2 37 36
Also 6 111 11
But 18 333 1139
consequently 2 37 59
Conversely 2 37 12
despite 11 203 221
due to the fact 2 37 0
Furthermore 7 123 73
in addition 12 222 75
in contrast 2 37 77
Moreover 2 37 177
nonetheless 4 74 108
So 3 55 89
Then 37 685 48
therefore 12 222 12
thus 14 259 719
ultimately 7 129 144
Yet 11 203 432

Capital letters on an entry refer to the frequency of the expression when used to start a sentence.

referential expressions indicating focus, quantity, intangible framing attributes, and time. The
rationale for the choice of some of these words and expressions was based on the study by Fraser
(1999), who investigated many of these expressions as discourse connectors in speech. These
expressions are frequently used to connect discourse units indicating several functions such as
topic elaboration (e.g., and, so, also, furthermore, in addition, moreover, thus, therefore), contrast
(but, in contrast, nonetheless, despite, conversely, yet), summarizing and topic focus indication
(ultimately, after all), and cause and effect (consequently, due to the fact). Table 4 presents a
list of these words and expressions with their corresponding raw frequencies in student overall
production for this history class. The frequencies of these words and expressions normalized to a
million words are also presented in this table.
Students generally favored simple conjunctions, conjuncts, and adverbs to express functions
which published authors frequently convey by using lexical bundles. For example, students used
expressions such as but, conversely, in contrast, and yet to indicate comparison or contrast. From
the previous list, But and Yet were the only words that students used at the beginning of sentences.
Markers of topic elaboration used by students consisted of words such as thus and so to introduce
further explanations and expressions such as also (used at the beginning of sentences by students
to express an “additive” function). Students also used expressions such as after all, then, and
ultimately (also at the beginning of sentences) to introduce final remarks or temporarily organize
their reports.
The last column in Table 4 presents the frequency of the words and expressions identified in
student writing when used by published authors as found in the corpus collected for this study.
Frequencies have been normalized to a million words in this case to compare these words and
expression to those considered frequent in academic prose in the literature (Biber et al., 1999).
As shown in Table 4, these expressions were used by published authors in the corpus in multiple
occasions. Simple coordinators or subordinators such as and, but, so or then have been found
400 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

to be much more common in everyday conversation than in academic prose. In some cases, the
grammatical role of a feature may vary across registers, as in the case of and, which in academic
prose is mostly used to coordinate phrases and not clauses. In contrast to popular consensus
(and the preaching of many writing instructors), published authors did use simple connectors
such as But, and So as conjuncts in academic papers, particularly at the beginning of sentences,
coordinating clauses. On the other hand, when used as an additive conjunction, Also was extremely
rare in published papers (it was used only 11 times in a million words).
Regarding words and expressions used by students to convey certain referential functions,
students used expressions such as consequently, due to the fact, subsequently, and therefore in
order to convey framing inferential functions (providing reasons or cause and effect functions). The
use of these expressions instead of simpler adverbials or subordinators to indicate these functions
may represent students’ efforts to write more academically. As reported in Table 4, however, these
expressions are not extremely frequent in published history writing, with the exception, perhaps,
of therefore, which was used 252 times in a million words by published authors. It seems published
authors favored longer word combinations to express these functions (such as as a result of, which
appeared 34 times in a million words, a very high frequency for a combination of four words).
The analysis of the use of temporal referential expressions revealed particular differences
between the writing of published authors and that of students. On the one hand, the corpus
of published writing showed temporal and multi-referential expressions as frequently used by
published authors. These authors generally employed these expressions to introduce dates or
events in history or as textual organizers, to guide their audiences in the reading of their papers.
These are examples of the use of at the beginning of and at the end of taken from the corpus of
published writing:
Morrison, instead, gave her to his nephew, who remembered entrusting her to a slave trader,
who took her to New Orleans at the beginning of 1857 and sold her to James White.
It is because I have found politics, law, orality, and literacy inadequate as contexts to account
for the diffusion of seals and the newer formulation of personal identity in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries that, inspired by semiotic anthropology and its programmatic directions,
I have come to consider sealed charters from the viewpoint of the writing bureaus that orig-
inated them, situating the conception and production of these charters within the scholarly
world described at the beginning of this essay as being in the throes of a semiotic crisis.
At the end of the war, Madison supported the re-charter of a Bank of the United States and
a protective tariff.
At the end of November, he published a six–part series on the food shortage, carried out of
Moscow to evade censorship.
Students, on the other hand, rarely used these expressions in their production for this history
class. Most of the time, when students referred to a period or time in history, they reproduced the
exact date, repeating it on different occasions in the same paper if the reference to such a date
was considered necessary. The use of these exact dates could also be related to the requirement
of displaying knowledge directly associated to being a student. These are some examples taken
from students’ production:
In fact, by March of 1947, it appeared that, from an American perspective, there were only
two ways to live in the world. In March of 1947, President Harry S. Truman announced to
Congress the “Truman Doctrine”.
 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 401

The “Big Three” agreed that something had to be done, but the western countries were still
suspect of Stalin because in Moscow, on the night of August 23, 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact
was signed. [. . .] In hopes that Germany would hold true to its word, the U.S.S.R. singed
the Nazi-Soviet Pact on the night of August 23, 1939.

When mentioning historical events students did so by including the name of the event without
any reference to the time when the event that was being described took place. This use may reflect
that students lack further knowledge on the relative time when certain events took place, which
published writers express more minutely, having the knowledge and authority to do so. Students
may also reference names of events instead of referencing an era or period, because they may be
taking their audience (history teacher) knowledge for granted.
All in all, the differences in linguistic exponents (lexical bundles, adverbs, conjunctions, etc.)
used to convey academic-related functions by published authors and university students present
a gap that seems difficult to bridge. On the one hand, expressions like lexical bundles, which are
extremely frequent in the production of published authors in history are extremely rare in student
production. On the other hand, students seem to favor structurally simple expressions or single
words to convey certain functions, expressions and words which, in general, are frequently used
in spoken registers and do not seem to be published authors’ first choices.

4. Conclusion

In the light of the findings of this study, many issues need to be taken into consideration related
to the quantity and quality of the teaching-learning situation presented in this investigation. First,
it may be argued that the systematic exposure to these target bundles that students had during the
micro-lessons was not long enough for students to put the use of these expressions into practice.
It is also possible that the learning of these expressions could be connected to the development
of students’ knowledge of the discipline and identity in the academic community. Tracing this
development could only be confirmed by conducting a longitudinal study of the same group of
students at different stages in their careers in the discipline in order to investigate their formulaic
language development.
The second issue is related to the type of activities that were planned and that students completed
in the micro-lessons. These activities may not have been suitable to trigger students’ individual
and autonomous use of these lexical bundles in their writing. Students might need more exposure
to examples in their contexts, which would allow them to investigate themselves how these
expressions are used by published authors. Perhaps a corpus-enhanced disciplinary writing course
could help students develop better strategies to start producing these expressions more frequently
and appropriately. Alternatively, the limited gains reflected in students’ use of lexical bundles after
instruction may indicate that these expressions are difficult to acquire, regardless of the teaching
methodology applied. It may be that in the short term, explicit instruction on lexical bundles can
only be expected to raise students’ awareness of their frequency and functions, and that gains in
active use are a much longer-term project.
A final issue is connected to the meaning and results of the use of these expressions by students.
Although it is undeniable that these expressions are frequently used by published authors in
the disciplines and that many lexical bundles can be used to identify a text type, it remains
to be discovered whether or not the use of these expressions by students in a frequently and
appropriate way would contribute significantly to perceptions that students produce better or more
sophisticated writing by professors in the disciplines. It is important to emphasize, though, that
402 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406

the analyses of the use of recurrent word combinations, such as lexical bundles, by professional
and novice writers in different academic settings may provide evidence for better understanding
of the language practices of certain academic communities and could help discover new ways of
helping students become members of those communities.

Appendix A. Examples from target bundles exercises from micro-lessons delivered in

the writing intensive history class (History 300)
V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 403
404 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406
 V. Cortes / Linguistics and Education 17 (2006) 391–406 405

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