---
title: "Academic English melting pot: Reconsidering the use of lexical"
description: "Studies comparing native and non-native academic English usually treat differences in lexical bundles (recurring sequences of… 23 references."
authors: ["Elena S. Gritsenko", "Olivier Mozard T. Kamou"]
year: 2024
venue: "Russian Journal of Linguistics 28"
source: "https://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics/article/viewFile/40913/23804"
doi: "10.22363/2687-0088-39663"
licence: "CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Russian Journal of Linguistics)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gritsenko-2024-academic-english-melting-pot-reconsidering/"
---
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# Academic English melting pot: Reconsidering the use of lexical bundles in academic writing

**Authors:** Elena S. Gritsenko and Olivier Mozard T. Kamou · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** [Russian Journal of Linguistics 28](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/russian-journal-of-linguistics/) ([Russian Journal of Linguistics 2024](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/russian-journal-of-linguistics/2024/)) · **Publisher:** [Peoples' Friendship University of Russia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/peoples-friendship-university-of-russia/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Russian Journal of Linguistics)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-39663) · [PDF](https://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics/article/viewFile/40913/23804) · [DOI 10.22363/2687-0088-39663](https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-39663) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4415518700)

**Citations:** 3 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Studies comparing native and non-native academic English usually treat differences in lexical bundles (recurring sequences of three or more words, such as *on the other hand*) as errors that L2 writers should correct. Gritsenko and Kamou question this view. They argue that many of these differences come from the academic conventions of the writers' home cultures rather than from weak English. To test this, they reviewed earlier research and built two corpora of student academic writing in English. The Russian corpus has 38 HSE texts (576,186 words). The Cameroonian corpus has 21 University of Yaoundé I papers (680,146 words). They analysed the corpora with content analysis, corpus analysis and comparison.

Both groups put the study's topic and procedures in the foreground and engaged less with the reader. Russian writers favoured chains of nouns linked by *of*, which mirrors Russian genitive constructions. Cameroonian writers used even fewer participant-oriented bundles than the Russians. The authors call for a descriptive, culturally aware, "post-native-speakerist" approach to bundle research, grounded in World Englishes and translingualism.

## Key points
- The Russian corpus contains 38 bachelor's and master's texts from HSE (576,186 words). The Cameroonian corpus contains 21 papers by students and teachers at the University of Yaoundé I (680,146 words).
- The study uses the standard extraction criteria from earlier work:
  - a frequency cut-off of about 10–20 occurrences per million words, or presence in 10% of texts;
  - presence in at least 3–5 different texts, to exclude idiosyncratic uses.
- Bundles are classified in two ways:
  - structurally, following Biber et al. 1999 (e.g., noun phrase + *of*, passive + prepositional fragment, anticipatory *it*);
  - functionally, following Hyland 2008a: research-oriented, text-oriented and participant-oriented.
- Non-native authors stressed research, method and topic over presentation and reader engagement. Russian texts showed frequent genitive-style noun strings. Cameroonian texts had the fewest participant-oriented bundles, even though English is their sole academic language.
- The authors frame the observed differences through translingualism (Canagarajah: a multilingual's languages form one integrated repertoire). They also cite EIL teaching models such as IPTEIL and CELFIL.

## Interesting ideas
- A multiword unit counts as a bundle only if it passes both a frequency threshold and a spread threshold (it must appear in several separate texts), which keeps one author's habits out of the inventory.
- The same bundle is labelled on two independent axes: its grammatical shape and its discourse function.
- Participant-oriented stance bundles such as *may be due to* and *it is possible that* serve as markers of hedging, separate from the propositional content they wrap.
- Systematic group-specific patterns, like long *of*-chains in Russian-authored English, are treated as a variety to describe rather than as noise to discard.
- The study interprets differences between writer groups against a reference norm without automatically labelling the deviating group as wrong.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): Apply the same frequency-plus-dispersion test when harvesting fixed multiword expressions for the lexicon of crate en, so that phrases common in only one document are not promoted to lexical units.
- **I2** (frames): Map text-oriented bundles such as *as a result of* and *on the other hand* to explicit discourse relations (cause, contrast) in prag, so that the connective structure is grounded in identified phrases rather than guessed.
- **I3** (world): Use such hedge bundles to attach a certainty level to the states and causes recorded in the text world, so that answers can distinguish asserted facts from tentative ones.
- **I4** (tree): Build a test slice of L2 academic English rich in nested *the X of the Y of* chains to check that the parsers attach these noun chains consistently, instead of assuming native-style input.
- **I5** (learn): Where witness parsers disagree mainly on non-native or regional text, log those cases as a separate variety signal for review rather than silently dropping them as unreliable silver data.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [National Research University Higher School of Economics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/national-research-university-higher-school-of-economics/) — University, Moscow, Russia · 23 works · 39,585 citations

Also on the byline: [Moscow State Institute of International Relations](https://ror.org/04zn7jb34).

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## Cite

Cite as: Elena S. Gritsenko and Olivier Mozard T. Kamou. 2024. Academic English melting pot: Reconsidering the use of lexical bundles in academic writing. Russian Journal of Linguistics 28.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{gritsenko2024academic,
  title = {{Academic English melting pot: Reconsidering the use of lexical bundles in academic writing}},
  author = {Elena S. Gritsenko and Olivier Mozard T. Kamou},
  journal = {Russian Journal of Linguistics 28},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.22363/2687-0088-39663},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-39663}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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23. Article history: Received: 25 June 2024 Accepted: 20 August 2024 Bionotes Elena S. GRITSENKO is Dr. Habil. in Linguistics, Professor of the English Department at MGIMO University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics of globalization, discourse analysis, language and gender. She authored and co-authored monographs, book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. e-mail: elena.s.gritsenko@gmail.com [https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8669-360X](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8669-360X) Olivier Mozard T. KAMOU is a PhD student at HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod. His research focuses on a corpus-based approach to indexicality and (im)politeness in online communities. His other research interests include corpus linguistics, computational pragmatics and conventionality. e-mail: otiotsopkamu@hse.ru, kamouolivier@gmail.com https://orchid.org/0000-0001-5291-3037 Сведения об авторах: [↗](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8669-360X)

*Updated 1 November 2026*