A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Connectives In Excellent Nmet Writing

As a bottleneck in second language acquisition, writing has been paid more and more attention to by foreign language teachers and researchers. However, writing has long been a weak aspect of Chinese students, so the scoring rate in Chinese students'writing is generally low. Coherence is considered to be one of the most important criteria of measuring the quality of compositions, and coherence of a composition is closely related to the use of a variety of cohesive devices. Connectives, as an important and most frequently used cohesive device, can be used to indicate the logical relations between words, phrases and sentences in compositions, so that the whole text will be more coherent. Although many scholars have conducted research into connectives, in the field of English teaching, very few scholars tried to do research into the use of connectives in National Matriculation English Test (NMET) writings. Therefore, in order to try to make up for this shortfall, the author will investigate the use of connectives in excellent NMET writings, in hopes of providing some profitable enlightenment for senior high school students'English writing and for the teaching of writing in senior high school.The study mainly adopts quantitative research method to conduct an investigation. Firstly, the author collects 60 excellent NMET writings as research material; secondly, all the 60 writings are input into text document in order to build a corpus named NMET; thirdly, all the connectives used in the writings will be tagged one by one manually; last, AntConc software will be applied to retrieve and get data. The results indicate that students have already known to use connectives to express the logical relations between sentences and paragraphs to readers consciously, and they like to use additive connectives best; the ten most frequently used connectives in those excellent NMET writings belong to only three types: additive, contrastive and causal connectives; a lack of variety is obvious in using connectives, and students tend to use those simplest ones learned in their early age; the multifunctional usage of some words leads to the overuse of them. The possible origins underlying such characteristics could be: 1) Students lack experiences in developing and organizing ideas. 2) Connectives are overemphasized by some textbooks. 3) Connectives are overemphasized by some writing reference books in so-called Model Writings. 4) Standardized tests bring about negative effect.Based on the results of all the analyses, the study provides four suggestions for English writing teaching in senior high school: 1) emphasizing discourse knowledge in teaching reading and writing; 2) using connectives in proper and prudent ways; 3) providing sufficient proper language input for students; 4) adjusting composition correction method.