Lexical bundles are part of any writing production. As these recurrent word combinations appear in various written outputs, many linguists, students, and researchers have become interested in exploring such linguistic expressions. However, most of them who examined the features of lexical bundles used computer corpora collected from native speakers of English. Therefore, little is known about lexical bundles produced by nonnative users of English, particularly the Filipinos who use English as their second language in government, business, religion, and education domains. Using the structural categories developed by Biber et al. (1999), this study examined the grammatical characteristics of three- and four-word English lexical bundles in a 100,000-word corpus produced by college students from different Philippine colleges and universities. The results revealed that the students seemed to be not very much knowledgeable about these language units because a majority of them used obscure and unsophisticated bundles. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed in this paper.
Keywords: Lexical bundles, structural taxonomy, academic essays, Filipino college studentsAnthony, L. (2007). Antconc 3.2.1w: Freeware corpus analysis toolkit. Retrieved from http:// www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp.
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