The impact of explicit instruction of lexical bundles on vocabulary usage and grammatical accuracy in writing in English: a practical approach

Along with recent developments in corpus linguistics, there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of formulaic sequences in acquiring language skills. This study set out to investigate the impact of explicit instruction of lexical bundles on the Iranian learners’ grammatical accuracy and vocabulary usage in English writing. To that end, 4 intact classes (2 classes in experimental group and 2 classes in control group) in a language institute in Tehran were chosen. All the classes underwent the regular language instruction stipulated by the language institute, but two classes, as the experimental group, received explicit instruction of lexical bundles as well. One writing test was administered to both groups before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the treatment (explicit instruction of formulaic sequences). Two blind raters scored the overall quality of the participants’ writing performance. The results showed that the participants in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.