Abstract

Drawing on studies of the linguistic challenges posed by English-medium instruction (EMI) to lecturers, this paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in two small, specialised corpora (ca. 65,000 words each) of Physical Sciences and Engineering lectures delivered in English in Anglophone (the UK) and non-Anglophone (Italy) university settings. The goal is to offer initial insights into the recurrent structures, functions and distribution of lexical bundles in EMI lectures. These multi-word units are focused upon because they are an important component of the university teaching register and because they contribute to fluency. The results suggest that the EMI lectures in the corpus are less formulaic than comparable lectures from the UK, in terms of the number of bundle types and tokens. They are also more 'unconventional', since they contain more bundles not found in previous studies of academic lectures. Finally, bundles conveying pragmatic meanings, particularly vagueness markers and hedges, are absent from the EMI lectures, hinting at a higher level of formality.