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The use of lexical bundles and the definite article ‘the’: A core expression analysis

Even though the learning and use of formulaic language is an important aspect of language learning, the study of lexical bundles, which are within the scope of formulaic language, appears to be an under-researched area in the domain of language learning and teaching. In this respect, the present study aimed to contribute to the literature by providing an account of the use of lexical bundles which included the definite article ‘ the ’ in a corpus of 160 literary analysis essays written by 2 nd year English Language Teaching students throughout a compulsorily taken English Literature course at a Turkish university. The secondary aim of the study was to test the functionality of the Core Expression Analysis method proposed by Shin et al. (2018) for the detection of attempted but erroneous lexical bundles which were typically left undetected by condardance analysis software since they deviated from standard forms. Lastly, the study aimed to perform error analysis on the lexical bundles which involved inaccurate uses of the definite article ‘ the ’. The results showed that the use of the definite article ‘ the ’ within the corpus were generally accurate and all of the inaccurate uses were due to omission errors. The findings also confirmed the functionality of Shin et al.’s (2018) Core Expression Analysis method to analyse attempted lexical bundles through the analysis of core expressions.