Mohamed Almahdi

Revisiting Lexical Bundles in Biology Research Articles

Research about lexical bundles in biology context has been scares. A few studies have investigated four lexical bundles in biology texts before. Thus, this paper aims to reinvestigate lexical bundles in professional biology research articles and compare the results with previous research. To do so, two graduate students and a professor from biology departments were interviewed to recommend popular journals from various biology subdisciplines. Then, a corpus of 400000 words was collected from research articles. To analyze the data, AntConc was used to generate four word lexical bundles from the corpus. After that, bundles were classified structurally according to Biber et al (2004) and functionally according to Hyland (2008). Results show that noun phrases and preposition phrases are the most popular structural category in biology context. On the other hand, research-oriented bundles are the prominent function of lexical bundles in biology papers. The results of the current study tend to be consistent with previous research. Finally, the researcher provides some activities for teaching lexical bundles. The activities are developed for students studying biology with researcher suggesting some digital tools to provide practitioners with some exercises. The activities are designed to be practiced during one lesson or over a larger period of time. Some of the activities are influenced by Nation’s (2013) three psychological processes: noticing, retrieving, and generating. Some of the digital tools used in the activities are Idiomstube, Wordtune, COCA, Mentimeter, Kahoot, Word Hippo and some others. 

Biography

Mohamed Almahdi received his BA in English from Omar Al Mukhtar University, Libya. In 2017, Mohamed earned his MA in TESL/TEFL from Colorado State University. Mohamed taught several EFL/ESL classes and is currently doing his Ph.D. in linguistics and applied linguistics at Arizona State University. His research interests are corpus linguistics, CALL and SLA.

Contact Information

msalmahd@asu.edu

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