A phraseological examination of research articles in the field of environment using key phrase frame

Abstract

Given that formulaic sequences play an important role in enhancing L2 learners' academic writing skillsand that phraseological sequences constitute a large proportion of written discourse, the current studywas an attempt to draw up a list of key phrase frames– phraseological sequences with a variable slot– ina corpus of research articles (RAs) in the field of environment. A complete list of such frames, extractedby kfNgram software, was subjected to a series of corpus statistics such as frequency, range, andkeyness, as well as manual filtering. This resulted in the generation of 65 four-word and 20 five-word keyphrase frames specific to the field of environment. Structural analysis revealed that the vast majority ofthese key phrase frames were content word sequences, while functionally most of them belonged toreferential expressions. Pedagogically speaking, L2 learners are recommended to develop a richrepertoire of formulaic sequences such as key phrase frames which are considered the cornerstone ofacademic discourse.