A Comparative Study on the Structural and Functional Features of Four-Word Bundles Used by English Native and Non-Native Upper-Level Students in the Economics Research Papers

Four-word lexical bundles are crucial in assessing English proficiency in academic writing. This study aims to examine similarities and differences in four-word lexical bundles' structural and functional use by native and non-native English-speaking students in economics papers from the MICUSP database, exploring reasons for these differences related to second language acquisition and teaching, and suggests improvements. Corpora were first cleaned and analyzed using AntConc, then categorized by Biber et al.'s structural taxonomy[1] and Hyland's functional taxonomy[2]. Results found that Native students favored noun/prepositional phrases and research-oriented patterns, while non-natives used more varied verb phrases and text-oriented patterns. The study discussed causes like L1 transfer in L2 acquisition and text focus in L2 teaching, aiming to inform future ESL pedagogy.