The Corpus - Based Use Of Connectives In Chinese Composition Of Chinese Middle School Students

Taking the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan as theoretical basis, a corpus-based research is conducted to describe the use of conjunctive devices in English writings by Chinese secondary school students.ST2in CLEC is chosen as subjects and the writings are firstly divided into two sub-corpora according to students’age and educational system in China in order to guarantee the reliability and validity of the research. Based on the previous researches,118variables in conjunctives are decided. And professional tools Wordsmith and AntConc are employed to retrieve variables one by one. At the same time, manual work is added to delete some exceptional conjunctive devices. With the aid of Excel, frequency of each conjunctive is accurately calculated and recorded. At last, SPSS software is utilized to analyze raw data.The results show that Chinese EFL learners can adopt each category of conjunctive devices consciously to express the internal logical relations between sentences. Among them, they mainly depend on the use of additive devices to connect sentences and different parts of a text together when they try to employ conjunctives, and then followed by the adoption of adversative, temporal and casual devices with the least occurrence frequency. By analyzing samples which are selected randomly, it’s revealed that there is a tendency of overuse of additive, underuse of adversative, temporal and casual devices. And the misuse of conjunctives is common among Chinese EFL learners. By conducting independent-samples t test, it’s found that there is significant difference between the two groups in the use of each category of conjunctive. Firstly, the occurrence frequency of the use of each sub-category of conjunctives in SH3is much less than that in SHI. And the analysis of samples indicates the comprehensive proficiency of Chinese EFL learners in conjunctive usage is supposed to be determined by the variation of conjunctive devices rather than by the number of employment of the conjunctive items. At the same time, it’s found that "standing wave" exist in English writings by Chinese secondary school students, That is to say, the conjunctive items with the highest frequency and the lowest frequency are relatively fixed in English writings by students at different grades. As for the explanation on the nature of "standing wave" in the use of conjunctives, it’s not discussed in the study due to many constraints and more efforts are needed in the further researches.