Lexical bundles, like recurrent multi-word combinations, act as discourse frames in a register and so are potentially significant as markers of expertise. The present study compared sentence initial lexical bundles (i.e. bundles at the beginning of sentences) in 43 Chinese Master’s theses written in English and 85 published research articles written by L1 or advanced L2 writers of English in terms of their frequency, grammatical structures and related discourse functions. The Chinese Master’s L2 texts showed a number of distinctive features, including but not restricted to an overuse of general nouns, pronoun it and sentence connectors, and an absence of shell nouns, anticipatory-it and some less transparent bundles. This paper discusses some of the possible reasons for these findings and indicates a need for pedagogic attention to cohesive devices and salient bundles which can be implemented with the help of effective corpus-based tools.