The Use Of Causal Connectors In Chinese Non-English Majors' Argumentative Writings

From a corpus-based perspective, this study mainly concentrates on the investigation of the use of causal connectors in the Chinese non-English majors' argumentative writings through comparison between the sub-corpus of CLEC (St4) and COCNUS. With the assistance of statistical package and computer programs (FoxPro, SPSS etc.), this study aims to provide quantitative data and qualitative analyses in detail on causal connectors which occur in the argumentative writings in St4, and discover the features of causal connectors in Chinese non-English majors' writings. The results revealed that there is significant difference in the frequencies of causal connectors between the two corpora. The Chinese advanced non-English majors overuse some informal causal connectors to a very large extent and underuse some formal causal connectors, which show they are not familiar with the stylistic requirements of the academic register. The positional tendencies of the adverbial causal connectors are radically different in the Chinese non-English major students' and the native students' essays. As for the logic pattern, due to different cultural backgrounds, the Chinese students prefer to use the cause-result pattern to a very large extent. There is little negative correlation between the learners' use of causal connectors and writing quality. At last, based on the findings of the research, some suggestions are proposed concerning teaching implications in order to improve the quality of Chinese non-English majors' argumentative writings.