Given the importance of effective communication among members of various academic disciplines, the research article has gained immense popularity among linguists, hoping to inform academic writing instructors and advanced EFL/ESL writers with the results of their analyses. This study hopes to achieve a similar goal by analyzing research article abstracts in terms of the frequency and function of lexical bundles. A corpus of 200 research article abstracts by Iranian authors in the field of applied linguistics was compared to a similar corpus of abstracts by native English-speaking authors. The results reveal that Iranian authors use more 4-word lexical bundles in their writing compared to their native speaker counterparts and often use these bundles for achieving specific genre moves. A linguistic analysis of the bundles also shows that the lexical bundles found in the Iranian corpus included more clausal elements and subordination, while native speaker bundles were more phrasal in nature.

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