English collocations and lexical bundles in business research articles: a comparative corpus study between expert writers and Thai novice writers

This study focused on the use of lexical collocations and lexical bundles in different sections of business research articles written by expert writers and Thai novice writers. The study aimed at finding similarities and differences in the use of verb-noun, adjective-noun and noun-noun collocations and 4-word bundles employed by the two groups of writers. Corpus of the expert writers consisted of 48 business research articles published in international peer-reviewed journals which have been indexed in SCOPUS. Corpus of Thai novice writers consisted of the same number of research articles published in international peer-reviewed journals which have been indexed in Thai-journal citation index. Findings of verb-noun, adjective-noun and noun-noun collocations showed that the expert writers and Thai novice writers produced different number of lexical collocations and their use of lexical collocations was not different in different sections of the research articles. Findings of structural classification of 4-word bundles showed that the two groups of writers employed slightly different proportion of phrasal and clausal bundles in all the sections. Classification of discourse functions of the 4-word bundles revealed that both groups used research-oriented bundles more than text-oriented and participant-oriented bundles. However, Thai novice writers employed very few participant-oriented bundles compared to the expert writers. The findings of the present study shed light to English language teaching and learning for Thai learners of English.