A Corpus-Based Analysis Of The Use Of English Linking Adverbials By Chinese EFL Learners

This thesis reports a contrastive study and its findings of the linking adverbials(henceforward LAs) in the English essays written by the Chinese EFL (English as ForeignLanguage) learners of non-English major (henceforward the Chinese EFL learners) and thosein the essays written by the native English speakers. The study explores the followingquestions:(1) What are the differences in the use of LAs between the Chinese EFL learners and thenative English speakers?a. Differences in terms of general tendency, including overall frequency, frequency ofeach semantic type, functional category and sentence position.b. Differences in terms of specific items, including top ten most frequently used LAs,overused and underused LAs by the Chinese EFL learners compared with the native speakersof English.(2) What are the possible causes that underlie the Chinese EFL learners' use of LAs? Isthere any evidence of mother tongue influence?(3) Is there any relationship between their use of LAs and the quality of their writing?What are the salient features in the use of LAs by learners with different linguistic proficiencylevels?In order to answer these questions, this research adopts the methodology of corpus-basedanalysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and uses three corpora as the datasources: CLTST3, a sub-corpus of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), a nativespeaker corpus of English and a native speaker corpus of Chinese. Contrastive studies arecarried out on the linking adverbials both in the three corpora and in the four different levelsof essays chosen from CLTST3. First, the author sets up a native speaker corpus of English(NSC) and a native Chinese corpus (L1 Chinese Corpus) which are comparable to CLTST3 asfar as the register and topics of the essays are concerned. Then the search items for this studyare determined, i.e., 100 English linking adverbials and their 143 Chinese equivalents. Next,with the help of professional concordance software WordSmith and Abproject, all the searchitems with their actual context undergo careful examination. The cases of non-adverbialconnectors are eliminated and the multifunctional adverbial connectors are differentiated.After that, statistical findings are collected for various analytical purposes mentioned above.Moreover, the statistical software SPSS (10.0) is used to test the relationship between theChinese EFL learners' use of LAs and the quality of their English writing. Finally, thestatistical findings are analyzed and discussed. The major findings of the study include:(1) The Chinese EFL learners have displayed a great tendency to overuse LAs in theirEnglish essays in terms of total tokens. Yet, they tend to use fewer contrastive/concessivelinking adverbials such as however, yet, instead, nevertheless, which are usually used informal discourse, and tend to use fewer certain corroborative linking adverbials such asactually, indeed, of course which serve interpersonal function. Moreover, they have displayeda stronger preference for initial position and a weaker preference for medial position in theuse of LAs compared with the native English writers.(2) The features demonstrated by the Chinese EFL learners in their use of LAs may beexplained as a result of mother tongue transfer, writing handbooks' and teachers' instruction,learners' lack of stylistic awareness and audience awareness.(3) There is significant correlation between the learners' use of LAs and their writingquality. The Chinese EFL learners with higher linguistic proficiency use more tokens andtypes of LAs and show stronger stylistic awareness, audience awareness and less evidence ofmother tongue transfer in their use of LAs than those with lower linguistic proficiency.The study is intended not only to shed light on the features characteristic of the ChineseEFL learners in their use of LAs to help raise both teachers' and learners' awareness of thevalue of linking adverbials in English writing, but also to establish a corpus-based approachthat can be extended to the studies of other linguistic phenomena.