A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Causal Discourse Markers In Chinese EFL Learners' English Writing

This paper reports a contrastive study on the causal discourse markers in essays written by Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers. The research explores the following questions:â‘ What are the features of the usage of causal discourse markers by Chinese EFL learners of different proficiency levels?â‘¡What are the differences in the use of causal discourse markers between native English speakers and Chinese EFL learners?â‘¢What are the Chinese learners'overused and underused causal discourse markers compared with the native speakers, and is there any evidence of mother tongue influence?â‘£Are there any stylistic and syntactic misused causal discourse markers for Chinese EFL learners?In this research, we mainly adopt the methodology of corpus-based analysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and use two corpora: CLEC and Brown (a native corpus). We make the contrastive studies on the causal discourse markers between Chinese corpora and the native corpus and the general as well as the specific usage of causal discourse markers by Chinese EFL learners. Two contrastive corpora are chosen for this purpose (CLEC & Brown). With the help of the search tools, Antconc, the search items can be carefully examined. The findings are examined by different analytical techniques.The main findings are:First, generally speaking, the higher the English proficiency is, the larger the total number of the use of causal discourse markers is. Learners with higher English level use more varieties than the lower-level learners; and learners of English majors use more than non-English majors.Second, compared with native speakers, the density of causal discourse markers Chinese EFL learners'use is higher. It indicates that Chinese learners depend a lot on their use of causal discourse markers to express the causal relations in essay writings. And Chinese learners use fewer varieties of discourse markers than native speakers do.Third, the research results show that there may be influence of L1 transfer on the learners'use of causal discourse markers. Signal words are usually ignored in their L2 writing. The results also show that the Chinese learners lack stylistic knowledge, which are reflected in their overuse of"so"and their underuse of"hence". As a result, there are many stylistic and syntactic mistakes appearing in Chinese EFL learners'essays.This research intends not only to shed light on the Chinese learners'use of causal discourse markers to help raise both teachers'and learners'awareness of the importance of using them correctly, but also to establish a corpus-based approach that can be extended to the studies of other linguistic phenomena.