چكيده
The use of lexical bundles as a particular type of word combination in various genres and disciplines has received a great deal of attention in academic discourse research (Atai&Tabandeh, 2014).Lately there has been a shift from studying individual lexical elements to studying multi-word terms.There are many studies that have investigated the use of lexical bundles, but no previous study has investigated the use of lexical bundles in the abstract sections of medical research articles, to the knowledge of the researcher.This study investigated the use of lexical bundles in the abstract sections of medical research articles, written by between native and non-native writers. The researcher looked for medical journals and found 100 research articles written by native and non-native writers. Next, the abstract sections were separated and the lexical bundles were extracted. Then, a comparison between native and non-native writers was made to find out which group had used more of lexical bundles.A content analysis was conducted in order to explore the text. The research articles from international journals by native speakers were recognized based on the author information. To identify the most prominent lexical bundles in the body, the researcher used the frequency of occurrence as the basis for the selection. To carry out this task quickly, Anthony's AntConc Concordance Program (2012) was used to collect the most common lexical bundles. Based on the results non-native writers used more lexical bundles, but these bundles were not popular and common well-known ones. Non-native authors used lexical bundles (74%) more than native speakers that only used (26%).The results of this study must be treated with some caution, since the corpus consisted of only one academic discipline: they cannot be generalized to all disciplines. In addition, since the structural and functional analyzes of lexical bundles were carried out qualitatively by hand, it is likely that there are some possible inconsistencies.The results of the current study, to some extent, provide some useful implications for EFL materials developers.Overuse of one category and underuse of another can be a sign that the writeris not familiar with the bundles. Therefore, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) experts and teachers should consider the importance of lexical bundles in academic writing and try to add variety to student writing by exposing students to different lexical bundles and their uses.
