Hard or Soft Science? Conceptualizing Educational Technology through a Lexical Bundle Analytical Approach

Abstract

An ongoing discussion on the disciplinary nature of educational technology has been taking place for years. Some view this discipline from the perspective of instructional design and implementation, whereas others conceptualize it from the perspective of media, tool, and system. This study examined educational technology from the perspective of language use by empirically investigating a special sequence of words, referred to as lexical bundles, in educational technology research articles. It aims to capture the distinctive nature of educational technology as soft technology and examine possible associations of educational technology with relevant disciplines. Employing a text analysis tool of AntConc 3.4.3, the researcher compiled a corpus encompassing 323 research articles from six journals with approximately 2.1 million words to identify lexical bundles. All identified bundles were analyzed and further compared with past relevant studies based on the number of different bundles, the content of bundles, and the grammatical structure of bundles. It was found that educational technology as an inter-discipline resembles much more soft science fields in terms of the content and structural categories of bundles. This study not only contributes to a better conceptual understanding of the nature of educational technology but offers a pedagogically beneficial bundle list for informing academic writing instruction in this field.