A Study On The Use Of Connectives In Chinese Tertiary EFL Writing

Since connectives are an important tool to tie a text and indicate logico-semantic relationship, they have drawn much attention from researchers. Those researchers have studied the differences in the use of connectives between Chinese learners and native speakers, probed into the use of connectives by Chinese learners of different English proficiency, tried to find out the relationship between the use of connectives and the quality of writing and the favorite classes of connectives used by Chinese learners, and studied the effect of misuse and overuse of logical connectives. But none of them have made a detailed study on the use of connectives by majors and non-majors. The author supposes that due to their different learning environments and shared mother tongue, majors and non-majors may have some similarities and differences in using connectives in their wring. Based on the supposition, she conducts the corpus-based study.The thesis is divided into five chapters to present the study clearly.Chapter 1 makes a brief review to data analysis theories according to temporal sequence: contrastive analysis, error analysis, performance analysis, discourse analysis and contrastive interlanguage analysis. All of those theories have both merits and shortcomings. With the passage of time and the efforts of researchers, analysis theories have been improved ceaselessly.Chapter 2 approaches to connectives and makes literature review. It presents different definitions of connectives, various classifications of connectives by traditional grammar, functional grammar and practical application, illustrates functions of connectives and reviews relevant studies on connectives in China and foreign countries. The thesis could be called as "the first" to make a detailed study on the use of connectives by majors and non-majors in their writing.Chapter 3 discusses the methodology of the study. The author selects out ST4 from CLEC and A3Text from SWECCL as data sources for general description and uses Concapp (V4.0) to analyze data. Some manual work is needed due to the complicated uses of a single word, for example, 'but' and 'since'. Then 40 texts are selected out from ST4 and A3Text with random sampling method to analyze connective errors therein.Chapter 4 shows findings and discusses underlying reasons. It is found that majors and non-majors share a lot of similarities in using connectives, such as the total number of connectives used, similar ten most frequently used connectives, colloquial style in writing and errors made in using connectives. But at the same time they differ from each other greatly. For example, majors use more coordinating conjunctions while non-majors use more subordinating conjunctions and sentence connectors; majors use more contrastive and concessive subordinating conjunctions and sentence connectors while non-majors use more enumerative and additive connectives; majors seem to be more flexible in using connectives. Those similarities and differences are attributed to living environment, shared native language, partial learning and incomplete applications of target language tools.Chapter 5 discusses the pedagogical implications of the study for EFL teaching. The use of other cohesive devices, the holistic overview of connectives, the application of corpus-based materials and authentic English materials are encouraged in EFL writing teaching while mechanic practice and "writing models" are discouraged.