Abstract

The general question this research investigates concerns the difference between the use of lexical bundles in a corpus of abstracts for theses in the liberal arts written by Chinese undergraduate students and a corpus of abstracts written by American master's degree students.  The undergraduate abstracts were first written in Chinese and then translated in to English at a medium-sized university in China. The master’s degree theses abstracts were downloaded from an online database.  It was found that there were differences in the types and tokens of lexical bundles in the two corpora with few shared bundles. There were fewer differences in the structural characteristics and in the functions of the lexical bundles found in the two corpora. Specific pedagogical recommendations are made, as well as implications regarding methodology in future research.

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