This corpus-driven longitudinal study investigates the structural use of lexical bundles in published research article (RA) introductions in applied linguistics written by English experts and Korean graduate students across two different levels of study. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of 200 published RA introductions and two corpora of 46 and 49 introductions of term papers written at two time points of the first and fourth semester of graduate course. In a further step, the structures of the bundles in different rhetorical moves of RA introductions were analyzed to reveal the developmental patterns in bundle use. The analyses show that the Korean graduate students are in the developmental process of academic writing featured by a shift from clausal style to phrasal style as their academic level advances. The results also suggest that the students have difficulty in appropriate bundle use in specific rhetorical moves even at the later academic level of graduate coursework. The pedagogical implications of L2 students’ developmental order are discussed.

The present study aimed at exploring the differences in EFL learners’ writing performance in two writing modes (direct and translated writing) in two writing genres (argumentation and narration) depending upon their L2 writing proficiency. For this study, 46 college freshmen (43.5% of high level and 56.5% of low level) performed four writing tasks individually. The results of the study are as follows: 1) their writing performance in the direct mode was significantly better regardless of genre and L2 writing proficiency, although there were substantial differences between the two genres in the degree of significance; 2) their writing performance in argumentative prose was significantly better only in the direct mode; and 3) only for low-level learners in the direct mode, there were significant differences in their performance in the writing genre, favoring argumentation. Theoretical and pedagogical relevance of the findings is addressed.