| This paper aims to study how Chinese high school English learners use DMs when they intend to improve discourse cohesion and coherence in their essay writings, and it seeks to answer the following two research questions:1. What are the characteristics of the frequently used DMs in Chinese high school English learners'essay writings?2. What are the characteristics of high school English learners'inappropriate use of certain DMs in their essay writings? What are the possible reasons behind their inappropriate use?In quantitative terms, the following characteristics of the frequently used DMs have been found:(1) Filler DMs have the highest frequency of occurrence, followed closely by contrastive and resultive DMs.(2) Filler DM I think is the most frequently used DM, with DM and coming next in frequency and resultive DM so being the third in terms of frequency.(3) High school English learners'use of causal, resultive, additive, contrastive and filler DMs showcases a shortage of diversity. (4) The abundant use of filler DM I think, resultive DM so and DM And reveals a spoken style in the students'writings.Through qualitative analysis, the following problems of high school English learners'use of certain DMs have been spotted:(1) Causal DM because is used to introduce sentence fragments.(2) Additive DM also is used redundantly or misplaced within a sentence.(3) Contrastive DM on the other hand is used to indicate an additive relation instead of a contrastive relation.(4) Temporal DMs such as first, second are used to lead arguments in an inductive manner or they are used to glue unorganized ideas together. (5) Certain DMs such as because, so, but and however are used to create pseudo coherence in their essay writings.Regarding the inappropriately used DMs above, possible sources are then predicted in terms of mother tongue interference, L2 learners'communication strategy, their learning context, cognitive ability and second language proficiency. |
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