A Corpus-based Analysis Of Adverbial Connectors In The Chinese EFL Learners' Written English

This paper reports a contrastive study on the adverbial connectors in the essays written by the Chinese non-English major college EFL learners and native English speakers. The study explores the following questions:(1) What are the differences in the use of English adverbial connectors between Chinese EFL learners and the native English speakers in terms of general tendency (overall frequencies, frequencies of semantic types, functional categories and sentence positions) and specific items (top ten most frequently used items, overused and underused items by EFL learners compared with native speakers of English)(2) What are the possible causes that underlie the Chinese non-English major college EFL learners' use of English adverbial connectors? Is there any evidence of mother tongue influence?(3) Is there any relationship between the Chinese non-English major EFL learners' use of adverbial connectors and the quality of writing?In order to answer these research questions, we adopted the methodology of corpus-based analysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and used three corpora: CLTST3, a subcorpus of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), a native speaker corpus of English (NSC) and a native speaker corpus of Chinese (L1 Chinese) as the sources of data. We carried out contrastive studies on the adverbial connectors in the three corpora and in the four different levels of essays chosen from CLTST3. F irst, weset up a native speaker corpus o f E nglish (NSC) and a n ative Chinese corpus (L1 Chinese) which were comparable to CLTST3 in the register and topics of the essays. Then we determined the search items, i.e., 100 English adverbial connectors and their 147 Chinese equivalents. Next, with the help of search tools, MicroConcord (MCO) and Abproject, all the search items with their actual context underwent careful examination. The cases of non-adverbialconnectors were eliminated and the multifunctional adverbial connectors were differentiated. After that, statistical findings were collected for various analytical purposes m entioned above, including the comparison o f the general tendencies o f adverbial connectors in the corpora and the specific study of some individual adverbial connectors. Moreover, SPSS (10.0) was used to test the relationship between the Chinese learners' use of adverbial connectors and the quality of their English writing. Finally, the statistical findings were analyzed and discussed. The major findings of the study include:(1) The Chinese non-English major college EFL learners have displayed a great tendency to overuse adverbial connectors in their essays in terms of total tokens. Yet, they tend to use fewer contrastive/concessive adverbial connectors which belong to formal style such as however, yet, instead, nevertheless and certain corroborative adverbial connectors such as actually, indeed, of course which serve interpersonal function. Moreover, Chinese learners have displayed a stronger preference for initial position and a weaker preference for medial position in the use of the English adverbial connectors compared with native English writers.(2) The Chinese learners' use of some adverbial connectors might be explained as a result of LI transfer, writing handbooks' and teachers' instruction, learners' lack of stylistic awareness and audience awareness.(3) There is significant correlation between the learners' use of adverbial connectors and their writing quality. The Chinese learners with higher linguistic proficiency use more tokens and types of adverbial connectors and show stronger stylistic awareness, audience awareness and less evidence of LI transfer in the use of adverbial connectors than those with lower linguistic proficiency.The study is intended not only to shed light on the Chinese learners' use of adverbial connectors to help raise both teachers' and learners' awareness of the valueof adverbial connectors in English writing, but also to establish a corpus-...