A comparative study of key 4-gram lexical bundles in Japanese L2 English and L1 English spoken monologues

Abstract

Numerous studies have investigated the language production of foreign language learners through corpus methods. However, to date most empirical investigations have focused on written production with limited corpus-based research into how learners speak in a foreign language. This paper is an extension of Sitler and Spivey (2025), who studied lexical bundles produced by Japanese EFL learners and L1 English speakers through spoken and written tasks. In this present study, 4-gram lexical bundles taken from the ICNALE Spoken Monologues corpus are compared between L1 Japanese speakers and L1 English speakers. Key 4-grams are extracted via Sketch Engine and analyzed through Biber et al.’s (2004) structural and functional taxonomies. The results show that there are similarities between the two groups with regards to both structural and functional bundle types. However, L1 English speakers display a higher usage of noun/preposition-based bundles and referential bundles. Furthermore, the L1 Japanese speakers produced various erroneous bundles. These findings indicate some key differences in English language usage between L1 Japanese students and native-level speakers and can be informative for EFL teaching practitioners.