A Study On The Coordinating Conjunction AND In Chinese Undergraduate English Majors' Writings

Conjunctions, as an important tool to make a text cohesive and coherent, have been a focus of discourse analysis and pragmatic research. Scholars at home and abroad have done researches to investigate the use of conjunctions by learners of different language levels. However, few of them have made a detailed study on the use of the coordinating conjunctions by Chinese undergraduate English major students. Based on this, this thesis extends the scope of previous studies and attempt to probe into the use of the coordinating conjunction AND in English compositions by Chinese undergraduate English Majors. There are mainly three research questions:1. What are the general characteristics of Chinese undergraduate English Majors' use of the coordinating conjunction AND in their writings?2. Why do Chinese undergraduate English Majors have some improper uses of the coordinating conjunction AND in their writings?3. What are the pedagogical implications for English writing teaching in universities?Research method and procedures are as follows:First of all, collect54compositions written by juniors from School of Foreign Languages, a local Normal University as the main part of data for this study and all the compositions will be entered into the computer in the form of TXT. Then, the author reads all the compositions carefully and then finds out all the ANDs used in each composition. After that, classify a part of the compositions into two different groups according to the average number of the conjunction AND used by all the students and then eighteen students of the two groups will be invited to be interviewed by the researcher. Finally, the collected data have been analyzed and the statistical findings are summarized. The main methods of this paper are quantitative and qualitative methods. The findings are mainly the following two aspects:1) It has been shown in this paper that the coordinating conjunction AND is used much more than BUT and OR by Chinese undergraduate English Majors in their English writings. Moreover, there are some improper uses of the conjunction AND in Chinese undergraduate English Majors'compositions. Error patterns are at six aspects, such as omission of AND, redundancy of AND, improper uses in sentence structure, semantics and tense, as well as parts of speech.2) There are mainly three causes for some improper uses of the conjunction AND in Chinese undergraduate English majors'writings:the interference of mother tongue, cultural differences, and incomplete application rules. In fact, these factors are all due to people different way of thinking.Based on the above major findings, the present study has offered some practical pedagogical implications. Firstly, teachers ought to adjust teaching method according to students'cognitive change and play a role as an instructor. Secondly, students should be taught to increase their awareness of coherence and audience when they write compositions. Thirdly, students'stylistic awareness should be developed and college teaching materials also need to be adapted.