Literature in the area of generic corpus-based discourse analysis indicates that the characteristics of the literature review part-genre have not been sufficiently scrutinized to decipher its distinctive rhetorical features. Consequently, the present study explores the structural and functional features of lexical bundles (LBs) embedded in the schematic structure of the Literature Review (LR) chapters in English Language Teaching (ELT) Ph.D. dissertations. Focusing on the most frequent LBs and their connection to the rhetorical moves of the LR chapters, the study investigates how these bundles function linguistically and rhetorically within ELT discourse. A mixed-methods approach was employed to identify the most frequent LBs across a corpus of LR chapters in 100 dissertations published in the ProQuest database. The move analysis approach was applied to fulfill the aims of this corpus-based study. Furthermore, AntConc Software was used to extract the four most frequent and five most frequent-word LBs. Subsequently, two reliable structural and functional taxonomies were employed to identify the LBs’ features. The findings revealed a meaningful structural and functional alignment between specific LBs and moves in the LR chapters, illustrating how bundles serve as cohesive devices to facilitate critical argumentation. The results of this study demonstrate essential pedagogical implications for materials designers, instructors, and scholarly writers. By incorporating move-bundle pedagogy into writing instruction and curriculum development, instructors could provide students with a practical framework to improve the coherence of their academic writing in relation to communicative purposes.
Pourchangi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.