Pawley and Syder (1983) propose the concept of lexicalized sentence stems as “a unit of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed”(ibid: 191-192), and they conclude that native speakers rely much on stringing lexicalized sentence stems together for their fluent communication (ibid: 202). The concept of lexicalized sentence stems has values in phraseology; however, ‘lexicalization’ is not particularly operationalizable in empirical research, as corpus studies have shown that most phrasal units are only partially lexicalized (see Moon 1998: 37, etc.). Granger and Paquot(2008: 44) develop further the notion of lexicalized sentence stems and propose textual sentence stems. According to them (ibid: 44), textual sentence stems are routinized fragments ofsentences that serve textual functions, and a textual sentence stem typically involves a subject and a verb. Examples of textual sentence stems are the final point is, another thing is,it will be shown that andI will discuss. The concept of textual sentence stems lends itself more easily to empirical research than the lexicalized sentence stem in that it attaches more importance to functions of the sentence stem rather than its lexicalization. However, Granger and Paquot did not propose the practical methods and procedures for identifying textual sentence stems so defined, particularly in corpus-based studies. In addition, sentence stems, as the clause-level phraseological units, may perform such functions as the research-oriented function or participant-oriented function in Hylland’s term (2008:13-14), other than the textual or text-oriented function. And in some cases a sentence stems may perform multiple functions simultaneously. For these reasons, in the present research, we propose to opt for the term ‘functional sentence stem’ (henceforward FSS). This paper aims to explore common functional sentence stems in academic English texts, with a view to uncovering their typical forms and specific functions in context, in order to better inform ESP students of language resources with higher pedagogic utility. Functional sentence stems are temporarily defined as “An FSS is a recurrent contiguous lexico-grammatical sequence which contains a subject-predicate structure and which is associated with a particular function pertaining to a particular textual environment. The FSS may have a range of variations. ” The definition spells out several important defining features of the linguistic entity. Firstly a FSS consists of a subject-predicate structure, which makes it more compete in grammatical structure than the lexical bundle. For example, previous studies show that, data indicate that and it is not surprising that are all FSSs dealt with in the present study. Second, statistically, an FSS has to be significantly recurrent to ensure that it is a common means for meanings and functions. In the present study, only those FSSs whose frequencies have reached a frequency threshold of 10 or above and whose new-MI scores have reached 3.0 or above will be counted as a FSS. Thirdly, an FSS performs particular functions in association with co-occurring lexical and grammatical features in the local textual environment. And the functions can be of different types and nature, but most often a FSS is typically used to help organize textual information or to express the writer’s attitudinal or evaluative meanings. Fourthly, a FSS is usually not a fixed expression and it may have a range of varied forms. For instance, this paper describes may be varied to this paper discusses, the present paper examines, etc. We then use the new-MI measure (Wei & Li 2013) to extract from an academic English corpus a large number of FSSs, structural and functional characteristics of which are carefully examined and described in association with their co-selection patterns. Results indicate that FSSs are important means for a wide variety of specific discourse acts pertaining to characteristic local textual environments. The findings have potentially valuable implications for ESP pedagogy, offering, in particular, insights for improving non-native novice writers’ academic writing performance.