Considering the role of academic writing in the dissemination of research findings among members of scientific communities, efforts have been made by language specialists to achieve a more detailed understanding of this register, with hopes that the derived features could then be used to teach researchers, writing in a second/foreign language, to more effectively communicate the results of their studies. This study sets out to achieve a similar goal through the analysis of research article introductions in terms of the frequency and function of their lexical bundles. To this end, a corpus of 200 research article introductions by published authors in the field of Applied Linguistics was compared to a similar corpus by Iranian, non-native writers of the same field. The findings reveal that Iranian authors use more 4-word lexical bundles in their writing compared to their native-speaker counterparts. Syntactic and functional differences between the two corpora are introduced and implications for academic writing instructors are discussed in detail.

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