A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Connectives

Connectives play an essential role in writing as cohesive ties. However, Chinese EFLlearners tend to under-use and misuse connectives. Previous studies on connectives are mainlyconcentrated on advanced Chinese EFL learners ( English majors and postgraduates).Therefore, this study aims to explore Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of connectives atdifferent proficiency levels. In order to make an overall investigation of Chinese EFL learners,contrastive interlanguage analysis and error analysis are carried out in this study. The data foranalysis are obtained from two corpora: Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) andFreiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB). The tool used in this study is Micro-concord1.0.From a corpus-based perspective, the study compares the usage of connectives by nativespeakers and Chinese EFL learners. Statistics show that Chinese learners have strongawareness of utilizing certain connectives in their compositions to achieve cohesion. Statisticsshow that Chinese learners overuse seventeen connectives of the twenty-three, of which fourare temporal connectives. The overuse of certain types of connectives results from fixed tasksas well as learners' limited knowledge about the variety of cohesive devices. The under-use ofcertain types of connectives is due to their multifunction in meaning and usage. The misuse ofcertain types of connectives by Chinese EFL learners results from language transfer, avoidance,training strategies, and overgeneralization.The acquisition of English connectives by Chinese EFL learners shows that the featuresof the acquisition of connectives are consistent with those of interlanguage: systematic,permeable, and transitional. Limitations of this study and pedagogic implications are alsotaken into consideration. It is suggested that teachers, when teaching connectives, should makestudents aware of the different functions of connectives in writing.