Abstracts Business

Formulaic Sequences in Business and Academic Writing of English Learners

by Detong Xia

Corpus linguists have long been interested in how words co-occur with each other for the past three decades. Formulaic sequences identified through a corpus-driven approach are considered the essential components of fluent linguistic production and effective communication. In addition, they also help language users create a professionally acceptable persona in the target discourse community. This three-paper dissertation study investigated three types of formulaic sequences (i.e., lexical bundles, phrase frames, and bigrams) in business and academic writing by English language learners. The goal was to improve the understanding of English learners’ formulaic language use in different registers. The first paper examined the structural and functional differences of lexical bundles (i.e., a sequence of four words that co-occur frequently in a particular register) used in English business emails written by learners of business English and working professionals. The findings showed that the learners and working professionals tended to compose business emails differently as suggested by the various structural and functional use of lexical bundles. The second paper focused on the use of phrase frames (or p-frames, i.e., a multi-word sequence with one word variable within the sequence) in business emails by learners of business English, compared to that of working professionals. The p-frames were examined in terms of the structural characteristics, functional characteristics, and variability. Results indicated that p-frames could serve as a means to express politeness and formality in email communication and that p-frames can facilitate business English learning. The last paper presents the findings of bigrams (i.e., directly adjacent word pairs) of eleven collocational patterns (e.g., adjective-noun, verb-preposition) in the argumentative writing of English language learners from basic to intermediate proficiency levels. Previous studies mainly focused on the use of collocations by English learners at the advanced proficiency level. This study found that even beginner level learners started gaining the phraseological knowledge. This dissertation concludes with the discussion of pedagogical implications based on the findings of this dissertation and suggests the directions for future research.