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Open AccessArticle

On the Creation of a Corpus-Derived Medical Multi-Word Term List

by Cosmin Mihail Florescu and Ryosuke L. Ohniwa

Information 2025, 16(2), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/info16020118 - 7 Feb 2025

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Although several studies have succeeded in creating medical word lists using corpus analysis methods, there is currently a shortage of comprehensive lists containing medical multi-word terms (MWTs). This study attempts to fill this gap by identifying medical MWTs using a large corpus of English language medical textbooks (28,384,681 running words). The term extraction function in Sketch Engine was used to extract high-frequency MWTs and to calculate keyness and dispersion data for each MWT. The validity of the resulting list and of specific subsets was tested using a different medical corpus and a general English corpus. The resulting list comprises 3307 MWTs with 63.83% (2111 MWTs) occurring at comparable frequencies in the different medical corpus and only 0.97% (32 MWTs) occurring at comparable frequencies in the general English corpus. The study also revealed clear differences in replicability between semantic subsets, with MWTs from the Anatomy and the Disorders semantic groups displaying high replicability, while MWTs from the Concepts and Ideas semantic group showed low to moderate replicability. The list may be used to develop evidence-based materials in English for Medical Purposes courses and to further explore how information is packaged in healthcare communication settings. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biomedical Natural Language Processing and Text Mining)

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45 pages, 2281 KB

Open AccessArticle

Exploring Lexical Bundles in the Move Structure of English Medical Research Abstracts: A Focus on Vocabulary Levels

by Motoko Asano, Kensuke Hirosuna and Miho Fujieda

Languages 2024, 9(9), 281; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9090281 - 23 Aug 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3156

Abstract

Research article abstracts, the second most-read part of research papers after titles, generally follow disciplinary conventions, which are often manifested in their language use. This study analyzed lexical bundles or multi-word sequences in move texts of a one-million-word corpus of English-language medical research article abstracts, with particular attention to vocabulary levels. The most frequent lexical bundles, such as “the primary end point was”, often occurred once per text and predominantly took part in realizing a move. The coverage of the first thousand New General Service List was 63.6% for the entire corpus but was around 80% for bundles in Move 3, describing principal results, and those in Move 4, evaluating the results. Many of the sequences were research-oriented bundles, used to express research contexts. The bundles were made up of relatively accessible word items, but the sequences occurred to realize highly specific research contexts. The findings suggest that becoming familiar with the bundle may need increasing awareness of disciplinary conventions such as guideline adherences and statistical procedures. This study may offer insights on the need for learners to familiarize themselves with these bundles. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vocabulary Studies in L1 and L2 Development: The Interface between Theory and Practice)

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30 pages, 1302 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Impact of Lexical Bundle Length on L2 Oral Proficiency

by Dan Hougham, Jon Clenton, Takumi Uchihara and George Higginbotham

Languages 2024, 9(7), 232; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9070232 - 26 Jun 2024

Viewed by 4320

Abstract

Lexical bundles (LBs) are crucial in L2 oral proficiency, yet their complexity in terms of length is under-researched. This study therefore examines the relationship between longer and shorter LBs and oral proficiency among 150 L2 learners of varying proficiency levels at a UK university. Through the analysis of oral presentation data (scores ranging from intermediate to advanced) and employing a combined text-internal and text-external approach (two- to five-word bundles), this study advances an innovative text-internal LB refinement procedure, thus isolating the unique contribution of LB length. Robust regression, dominance analysis, and random forest statistical techniques reveal the predictive power of bigram mutual information (MI) and longer three-to-five-word sequences on higher proficiency scores. Our results show that learners using higher MI score bigrams tend to perform better in their presentations, with a strong positive impact on scores (b = 14.38, 95% CI [8.01, 20.76], t = 4.42; dominance weight = 58.63%). Additionally, the use of longer three-to-five-word phrases also contributes to better performance, though to a lesser extent (dominance weight = 18.80%). These findings highlight the pedagogical potential of a nuanced approach to the strategic deployment of LBs, particularly bigram MI, to foster oral proficiency. Suggestions for future LB proficiency research are discussed in relation to L2 speech production models. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Vocabulary Studies in L1 and L2 Development: The Interface between Theory and Practice)

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17 pages, 257 KB

Open AccessArticle

Understanding the Sustainable Growth of EFL Students’ Writing Skills: Differences between Novice and Expert Writers in Their Use of Lexical Bundles in Academic Writing

by Shaojie Zhang, Hui Yu and Lawrence Jun Zhang

Sustainability 2021, 13(10), 5553; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105553 - 16 May 2021

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 7799

Abstract

Lexical bundles, as building blocks of discourse, play vital roles in helping members from the same academic community achieve successful communication and disseminate sustainable disciplinary knowledge. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles in postgraduate writing. Drawing on Biber et al.’s (1999) structural taxonomy and Hyland’s (2008a) functional taxonomy, we identified and compared lexical bundles in two self-built corpora, an EFL student writing corpus and an expert writing corpus. The results indicate considerable structural differences between the two groups: the student writers used verb phrase-based bundles more frequently and prepositional phrase-based and noun phrase-based bundles less frequently. In terms of function, although the two academic groups showed similar distributions of the three main functional categories, as student writers they exhibited insufficient reader-awareness and incomplete knowledge of stance expressions. It is hoped that the findings will shed light on future pedagogical practices to help novice writers improve their academic writing competence as a sustainable goal in enhancing their academic scholarship. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applied Linguistics and Language Education for Sustainable Development)

15 pages, 373 KB

Open AccessArticle

Advantage in Reading Lexical Bundles is Reduced in Non-Native Speakers

by Matteo Valsecchi, Viktoria Künstler, Sven Saage, Brian J. White, Joybrato Mukherjee and Karl R. Gegenfurtner

J. Eye Mov. Res. 2013, 6(5), 1-15; https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.6.5.2 - 10 Dec 2013

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 316

Abstract

Formulaic sequences such as idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles, which may be processed as holistic units, make up a large proportion of natural language. For language learners, however, formulaic patterns are a major barrier to achieving native like compe-tence. The present study investigated the processing of lexical bundles by native speakers and less advanced non-native English speakers using corpus analysis for the identification of lexical bundles and eye-tracking to measure the reading times. The participants read sentences containing 4-g and control phrases which were matched for sub-string fre-quency. The results for native speakers demonstrate a processing advantage for formulaic sequences over the matched control units. We do not find any processing advantage for non-native speakers which suggests that native like processing of lexical bundles comes only late in the acquisition process. Full article

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