A little bit about: analyzing and teaching lexical bundles in academic lectures

For English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) students, high academic listening skills are essential in order to succeed at the university level, and yet instructional materials in academic listening often lack authenticity (Flowerdew and Miller 1997). As corpus-based data has become more prevalent and corpus-based findings have become more and more accessible, ESL/EFL instructors are now in a position to investigate how language is actually used in the content classroom and to design lessons accordingly. The present study focuses on the use of lexical bundles, defined as recurrent word combinations, in academic lectures. A small group of lexical bundles which are frequently found in spoken academic language are examined in order to carefully analyze their function in this register, comparing the use of bundles by instructors to that of students. The findings of this comparison are used as the basis for the design of a series of academic listening lesson plans, focusing on those bundles that most often occur in academic lectures and the functions they perform in that context.

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