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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 98 (2014) 864 – 869

International Conference on Current Trends in ELT

The Impact of Teaching Lexical Bundles on Improving Iranian

EFL Students’ Writing Skill

Mahmood Kazemia, *, Sara Katiraeib, Abbass Eslami Rasekhc

a, b, c
University of Isfahan, Hezar-Jarib Ave., Isfahan, 81746-73441, Iran

Abstract

The present study aims to examine how significant the use of lexical bundles prevalent in the field of applied linguistics can be in
students’ writing materials. Forty lexical bundles which were judged to be the most frequent, most relevant and functionally
important to the discipline of applied linguistics were chosen and taught to twenty MA students of TEFL. They were asked to
write a piece of writing on a given topic prior to and after the instruction. The bundles were intended to help them develop their
ideas into organized paragraphs. The data included students’ writings, as well as their elicited views, collected through a
questionnaire, regarding the helpfulness of the bundles in writing skill. The findings indicated that the bundles were of significant
help to the students’ writing ability and that students attribute great importance to lexical bundles. The findings indicate that
every course in writing should give significance to the teaching of lexical bundles.

© 2014
© 2014 Kazemi,
The Authors. Published
Katiraei, by Elsevier
and Eslami Ltd.
Rasekh. This is an
Published byopen access
Elsevier article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
Ltd.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Urmia University, Iran.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Urmia University, Iran.
Keywords:Lexical bundle; writing skill; genre; applied linguistics; Iranian EFL students

Introduction

Writing skill gains great importance in higher education and being identified as a member of the disciplinary
community of expert writers is one of the aspirations of many students in almost any field of study. To this end,
students should try to use those word combinations that are part of disciplinary conventions, which are typically
used by established academics (Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, 2008b; Schleppegrell, 1996).

*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +98-913-2696252
Email address: [email protected]

1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Urmia University, Iran.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.493
 Mahmood Kazemi et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 98 (2014) 864 – 869 865

Lexical bundles, also known as chunks or clusters (Hyland, 2008a), are a type of relatively recently introduced
word sequences defined as the most frequently occurring fixed-form sequences of three or more words that are
usually neither idiomatic nor complete structural units although they have strong grammatical correlates (Biber,
Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan, 1999; Biber, 2006). Examples of lexical bundles include expressions such
as on the other hand, the end of the, and it is important to.

Since lexical bundles are very common in language, it might be assumed that they will naturally and easily be
acquired. But as Biber and Barbieri (2007) and Cortes (2006) note, the acquisition and proper use of these
expressions does not seem to naturally happen. Although expert academic writers in different disciplines and genres
make use of a wide variety of lexical bundles to develop their arguments and persuade the readers, many lexical
bundles favored and used by experts are never or quite rarely used by students in different fields and at different
levels of expertise (Chen & Baker, 2010; Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008a, Jalali, Eslami Rasekh & Tavangar Rizi,
2008).

Most studies regarding lexical bundles take a corpus-based approach and focus on determining the bundles
used in a given discipline and on the variability or the similarity in the type and frequency of the lexical bundles
used across different disciplinary fields, registers, genres, and different degrees of writing expertise (e.g., Biber et
al., 1999; Biber, Conrad & Cortes, 2004; Cortes, 2013; Herbel-Eisenmann & Wagner, 2010; Karabacak and Qin,
2012).

There are also studies suggesting different ways of introducing students to the use of frequently recurring word
combinations. Lewis (2000) introduces many innovative ways of teaching collocations. Pang (2010) also describes
several strategies and techniques that will enable second language (L2) students to expand their repertoire of
academic rhetorical features to include these multi-word sequences.

Very few studies have dealt with explicit instruction and practical applications of lexical bundles or with
students’ attitudes toward the helpfulness of these multi-word sequences in their writing ability (Cortes, 2006).
Jones and Haywood (2004) instructed a group of university students who were all non-native speakers of English on
the use of certain word combinations during a 10-week period. Their results showed minor gains in the production
of formulaic language after the instruction but they reported high motivation and predisposition towards the use of
these expressions by the participants in their study. They also emphasized that students’ underuse of formulaic
expressions in their academic writing may result in unacceptable writing. In another study, Cortes (2006) found her
five 20-minute sessions of teaching lexical bundles to a group of university students in a writing-intensive history
class too short to make significant differences between pre- and post-instruction production of lexical bundles but
they indicated an increase in students’ awareness of and interest in these expressions.

To date, to researchers’ knowledge, no study has investigated the impact of instructing advanced EFL learners
on the use of lexical bundles in writing in the discipline of applied linguistics, more specifically in the field of
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Advanced TEFL learners are supposed to have little difficulty in
the perception of lexical bundles since these expressions are so prevalent in the discipline. But it is not clear whether
these learners can use lexical bundles in writing without difficulty and if providing them with a list of most related,
most frequent, and functionally important lexical bundles in the field can improve their writing ability.

The study may have both theoretical and practical contributions to the field of applied linguistics. Theoretical
to the sense that it may contribute to a redefining of the characteristics of a good writing class and practical in the
form of recommendations to EFL students and novice writers as well as to writing course instructors about the
importance and helpfulness of lexical bundles in improving students’ ability in writing.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the usefulness of teaching lexical bundles on improving students’
writing ability. So, the following questions will be addressed:
1. What is the impact of teaching lexical bundles on improving Iranian advanced TEFL students’ writing skill?
2. What are the attitudes of Iranian advanced TEFL students about the helpfulness of lexical bundles in
improving their writing ability?
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2. The study

2.1. Participants

Twenty master’s (MA) students (9 males and 11 females) majoring in English language at two different
universities in Iran (i.e., universities of Isfahan and Sheikh Bahaie) participated in this study. They had completed
their BA programs in English-related fields of TEFL, linguistics, or translation studies.

2.2. Instruments

The instruments used in this study were: (1) students’ writings prior to and after the instruction, scored by two
independent university instructors with a simple percentage agreement of 81%, , and (2) a questionnaire, consisted
of 16 items, through which students’ views regarding the helpfulness of lexical bundles in their writing was elicited.
The questionnaire used a 5-point Likert Scale. Since the participants were all advanced level students of applied
linguistics, the questionnaire was written in English. Three university instructors judged and confirmed the validity
of the questionnaire. After pilot testing with 10 students, using KR-21 formula, the reliability value for the
questionnaire was calculated to be 0.76.

2.3. Procedures

The study took four 90-minute sessions, over a period of one month to complete. In the first session, after
describing the project, as a pre-test of writing the participants were asked to write a passage of about 1000 words on
the topic ‘The role of vocabulary in EFL reading comprehension’. In the second and third sessions, the students
were provided with a list of 40 lexical bundles which based on corpus studies (Jalali et al., 2008; Hyland, 2008a,
2008b) were considered the most frequent in and the most related to the field of applied linguistics. As expected, all
the students affirmed that they had no difficulty understanding the bundles provided. The participants were given
instructions on the importance, frequency, and appropriate use of lexical bundles in academic advanced writing.
Then, following Cortes (2006), the students worked in pairs analysing functions and possible uses of the bundles
introduced in contextualized examples taken from the corpus of applied linguistics journal articles. Then they went
through some application exercises of the type multiple-choice, filling in the blanks, and inappropriate use
correction.

In the last session, the students were asked to write a passage of about 1000 words using about 10 bundles on
the topic ‘The role of vocabulary in EFL reading comprehension’ (the same length and the same topic as pre-test).
After collecting the students’ writings, they were asked to fill in the questionnaire provided to give their opinions
about the experience and how useful the bundles were in helping them to write more fluently and to produce a more
organized text.

In order to numerically codify the data gathered, two independent university instructors of writing courses
scored the students’ writings in both pre- and post-test on a scale of 1 to 20 and the mean of the two scores for each
text was taken as each subject’s score in writing. As for the questionnaire, the rating scale was coded as 1-strongly
disagree, 2-disagree mostly, 3-neither agree nor disagree, 4-agree mostly, and 5-strongly agree. The data collected
was subjected to analysis at item level through descriptive statistics. The frequencies, percentages, means, and
standard deviations of each item were calculated.

3. Results

3.1. The results of students’ writings in pre- and post-test

Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for students’ writings in pre-test (i.e., before teaching lexical bundles)
and post-test (i.e., after teaching lexical bundles).
 Mahmood Kazemi et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 98 (2014) 864 – 869 867

Table 1: Paired Samples Statistics

Mean N Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean
Pre-test 14.75 20 2.04875 .45811
Post-test 15.95 20 2.28208 .51029

Table 2 shows the results of running a paired samples t-test between pre- and post-tests of writing. It indicates
that the difference between the pre- and post-test scores is significant at .05 level. It can be concluded that teaching
lexical bundles significantly improves Iranian advanced TEFL students’ writing skill.

Table 2: Paired Samples Test

t df Sig. (2-tailed)
Pre-test - Post-test -6.990 19 .000

3.2. The results of students’ responses to questionnaire items

Table 3 shows the summary statistics for the responses the students provided for each item in the questionnaire.

Table 3: Summary Statistics for Students’ Responses to Questionnaire Items

Mean % SD
1. I didn’t have much experience with lexical bundles before this program. 2.4 48 1.23
2. I found this experience with lexical bundles satisfying. 3.55 71 0.94
3. I will pay more attention to using lexical bundles in my future writings. 4.2 84 0.83
4. I really like to learn more about lexical bundles because my current knowledge about and 3.55 71 1
ability to use is not enough.
5. I haven’t received sufficient help, training and helpful advice from my writing instructor 4 80 1.21
on appropriate use of lexical bundles.
6. Advanced writing instructors should give special importance to teaching lexical bundles. 4.7 94 0.47
7. Getting familiar with lexical bundles is mostly needed by students who want to write and 4.5 90 0.69
publish in my field, i.e., applied linguistics.
8. Using lexical bundles helps me point out my ideas more clearly. 4.15 83 1.14
9. Using lexical bundles in writing is meaningful and improves the organization of my 4.3 86 0.66
writing.
10. The application of lexical bundles promotes my writing interests. 3.75 75 0.72
11. Using lexical bundles enhances my thinking ability. 3.75 75 0.64
12. I believe that appropriate use of lexical bundles improves the quality of my writing. 4.35 87 0.59
13. Knowing and using lexical bundles will respond to some of my needs in writing. 4.15 83 0.88
14. By knowing lexical bundles I will be better prepared to work through my future 4.1 82 1.02
problems in writing.
15. By using lexical bundles I will be more successful in academic writing. 4.45 89 0.69
16. Overall, I think lexical bundles are very important and useful for improving my writing 4.7 94 0.47
ability.

As shown in table 3, the results indicate that although the students are advanced learners and will soon be
MA graduates in TEFL, about half of them (48%) had little or no previous experience with lexical bundles. About
two-third (71%) of the participants feel some degrees of satisfaction about this experience. It is very important to
868 Mahmood Kazemi et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 98 (2014) 864 – 869

note that even though 90% of the participants believe that getting familiar with lexical bundles is mostly needed by
students who want to write and publish in the field of applied linguistics, a great majority of them (80%) believe that
they haven’t received sufficient training from their instructors in this respect. Interestingly, almost all of the
participants (94%) assert that advanced writing instructors should give special importance to teaching lexical
bundles. Most items in the questionnaire try to elicit the participant’s views about the different aspects in which
lexical bundles are supposed to be helpful regarding their own ability in writing. In short, with regard to these
different aspects (e.g., improving the organization of text, solving some future problems in writing, etc.) about 82%
deem lexical bundles helpful. But in their overall judgment, almost all of the students (94%) think lexical bundles
are very important and useful for improving their writing ability.

4. Discussion and Conclusion

The findings of the present study revealed important points regarding the usefulness of lexical bundles in
improving Iranian advanced EFL learners writing skill. The findings were all in favor of the positive impact of
lexical bundles on students’ writing ability. Although the duration of the instructional program was short, unlike the
participants in Cortes (2006) and Jones and Haywood (2004) studies, according to the results of pre- and post-test
descriptive statistics and the t-test (Tables 1 & 2), the participants of the present study could significantly improve
their scores in writing after being trained in using lexical bundles. This outcome may have been because the
participants in the present study were all advanced English-major EFL students who supposedly know the bundles
and just need some practice to enhance their awareness of and attention to these neglected, but important, discourse
elements and use them appropriately to improve their writing quality. Based on the results of the survey of students’
attitudes toward the helpfulness of lexical bundles, we can conclude that Iranian EFL learners, even at advanced
levels, are not familiar with these recurrent sequences of words and that they get very little, if any, training about
lexical bundles. While this is the case, almost all of the students attribute great importance to lexical bundles and
feel the urgent need to get thorough understanding of this important and almost completely overlooked dimension of
foreign language learning.

Based on these findings, it is important that advanced writing course designers and instructors, as well as EAP
specialists, recognize the great importance of lexical bundles and try to develop research-based instructional
packages appropriate with regard to the student’s specific target context. There should be opportunities for students
in writing courses, as well as in EAP courses, especially in advanced levels, to became familiar with and use those
word combinations that are more relevant to their target genres and are used by expert writers in the field. Repeated
exposure in reading materials, lists of clusters, noticing (Cortes, 2004, 2006) , consciousness-raising tasks (Lewis,
2000), concordances (Hyland, 2008a), activities such as item identification and matching, as well as activities which
makes learners produce the items in their writing can be among many other techniques which instructors can use
with their students.

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