Bundles to beat the band in high-stakes tests: Pedagogical applications of an exploratory investigation of lexical bundles across band scores of the IELTS writing component

Lexical bundles (LBs) in ESL/EFL examinees' writings and the effectiveness of their instruction on the learners' performance are under-researched as far as international high-stakes examinations, particularly IELTS (International English Language Testing System) writing genre(s), are con-cerned. To fill these gaps, the present two-phased study, in its exploratory phase, aimed at investigating the form, functions, and distribution of LBs in approximately 1000 mock academic IELTS writing tasks across three levels of writing competence. For the next phase, a pedagogical intervention was implemented and its impact on improving the performance of the IELTS can-didates was evaluated. The results demonstrated that the higher the proficiency of the examinees, the higher the frequency and range and the more varied the structures and functions of deployed LBs. Additionally, the majority of the LBs were equally dispersed in all parts of the texts although there were some instances which characterized introduction, body, or conclusion sub-sections. Finally, the adopted explicit functional pedagogical approach was found to be effective, espe-cially in boosting cohesion and coherence and lexical resources scores. Highlighting the nature of IELTS texts as distinct genres, we conclude with the implications of studying (and teaching) LBs for writing instruction and examination.