A Corpus-based Study Of Adverbial Connectors In The Chinese English Majors' Argumentative Writing

One way to improve coherence and clarity in a written text is to signal logical relations between units of the text by means of adverbial connectors. But a number of studies have shown that the use of adverbial connectors is problematic for language learners, in particular foreign language learners. This paper extends the scope of previous studies and reports a more detailed comparative study of the use of adverbial connectors in the argumentative essays written by L1-Chinese English majors and native college students. The study has explored the differences of connector use between the two groups of writers and within the Chinese learners with different English proficiency levels as well.This comparative study was conducted with the aid of a corpus-based approach and under the scheme of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). The corpora involved were Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). We selected 240 argumentative essays from WECCL, 60 for each grade of L1-Chinese English majors, to establish the learner corpus (LC), and 176 argumentative essays written by American university students as the native corpus (NC) from LOCNESS. To carry out the contrastive study of the two corpora, we first determined 108 English adverbial connectors of seven semantic categories mainly from Biber et al.'s (2000) taxonomy and then examined the frequency, sentence position and actual context of each item in both corpora respectively, with the help of WordSmith Tools (Version 3．0) . The statistical features were collected for various analytical purposes, including the comparisons between LC and NC and within LC. Finally, we used Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS ) at version 13．0 to conduct Chi-square tests, to seek whether the observed differences of features were statistically significant. majors have a great tendency to overuse adverbial connectors in their argumentative writing in comparison with native college students. Such general tendency comes from learners' overuse of connectors in the six semantic categories. With respect to the position of connectors in the sentence, the Chinese learners have a stronger preference for initial position than native students and a corresponding weaker preference for medial position. To explain the above findings we proposed two possible origins of the learners' problematic use of connectors, i.e. over-teaching (either by teachers or textbooks ) and the oral style in learners' writing. The learners are sometimes encouraged by the instruction of teachers or some writing models and exercises in textbooks to use too many adverbial connectors, usually in clause-initial position, in their argumentations. In the meantime, they prefer to use much more colloquial connectors and such oral style in argumentative writing may also give rise to the avoidance of the use of some formal connectors and accordingly the overuse of colloquial ones. Meanwhile, the Chinese learners, with the lifting of the proficiency level, tend to use fewer tokens but richer variety of adverbial connectors in writing; also, the tendency of using colloquial connectors in compositions diminishes and the learners tend to use more connectors of formal register, indicating the oral style in their written output seems to become less and less obvious as their English proficiencies improves.The present study sheds some light on the teaching and learning of English adverbial connectors in writing. And the corpus-based methodology we employed can be extended to the studies of other linguistic phenomenon and to language teaching and learning as well.