Based on a self-buih 2,774, 166 word corpus of three-discipline English academic articles, this paper explores the disciplinary variations in the frequencies and preferred uses of chunks in terms of discourse function, i.e. research-oriented chunks, text-oriented chunks, and participant-oriented chunks. The findings indicate that research-oriented chunks occupy the highest propor- tion of all the chunks in academic articles, text-oriented chunks the next, participant-oriented chunks the lowest. It is also found that there are significant discip...