A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese Efl Learners' Acquisition Of Introductory Conjunctions Of Causal Clause

Causal relations are central to the way humans perceive and interpret the interplay between states of affairs in the everyday world. (Meier,2002) Causal clause is one of the basic ways to express such relations and it is also one of the adverbial clauses that Chinese students have to possess at the beginning stage of their English learning. In written English, causal conjunctions play a significant role in causal clauses. Therefore, to study the use of such conjunctions will help to evaluate the level of students'acquisition of English causal clauses to a certain degree. We have seen some relevant researches made by scholars at home and abroad, but most of them do not supply enough statistical work or their work is not deep enough, even no one has studied the Chinese English-majored learners'acquisition of causal conjunctions. Applying the corpus approach, this thesis makes a contrastive study on the four most frequently used causal conjunctions because, for, since and as in English writing between the Chinese English-majored learners and British native English writers. The study tries to answer the following several questions:1) How do Chinese English-majored learners (Chinese EFL learners) use introductory conjunctions of causal clauses as compared against native writers? Do they have special features? 2) Do Chinese English-majored learners make mistakes when using such conjunctions? If so, what are the common mistakes or inappropriateness in their use? 3) What are the reasons underlying the mistakes or inappropriateness?In order to answer these questions, the author takes corpus WECCL (written part of SWECCL) as source of data and written part of BNC as the reference corpus. Research tools used in the study include software such as WordSmith, AntConc, SARA, PowerGREP, EditPad Pro and SPSS. By using quantitative and qualitative analyses under the disciplines of Error Analysis and Interlanguage, the study has the findings as follows:1. Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse conjunctions because and since. They have their own features in use of the four causal conjunctions in different writing styles and in different grades.2. Chinese EFL learners have more preference putting causal conjunctions in the initial position of sentences than English native writers do.3. In collocation, Chinese EFL learners differ significantly from the native writers in relying on a much fewer words such as "maybe", "just", "only" and "mainly" to modify because.4. Misuse of the four conjunctions exists among Chinese EFL learners. For examples, some conjunctions are confused with prepositions or verbs; causal conjunctions are chosen incorrectly; such redundant structures as "because...so..." or "since... so..." are observed in Chinese EFL learners'writings.The author attempts to offer some possible explanations to the errors and inappropriateness found in Chinese English-majored learners' use of causal conjunctions. Pedagogic implications and limitations of this study are also taken into consideration. With regard to directions for future research, learners'spoken corpora can be taken as source data for the study of the features of causal conjunctions used in spoken English, or more corpus-based contrastive studies of discourse produced by EFL learners from various linguistic backgrounds will greatly increase our knowledge of L1-related and universal features of causal conjunction usage.