ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters, I delved into the microlevel of the specialized corpus at the word level, looking specifically at tutors’ and student writers’ function (chapter 5) and content (chapter 6) key words. In both chapters, I zoomed out to examine those key words in context, at the macrolevel, using discourse analysis to better understand how tutors and student writers use those key words that differentiated the writing center talk from other registers. Here in chapter 7, I examine lexical bundles such as “I don’t know” as another path to understanding the aboutness of writing center talk. As discussed in chapter 3, I analyzed the 10 most frequent 4-grams in the tutor subcorpus and the eight most frequent 4-grams in the student-writer subcorpus because, meeting the thresholds set, they counted as lexical bundles.
