A Corpus-Based Study Of Linking Adverbials Used By The Advanced Chinese EFL Learners

Linking adverbials, as one of effective cohesive devices, improve the textualcoherence and cohesion in communication. A large number of studies have found outthat learners, especially EFL learners, overuse, underuse and misuse linking adverbials.The scope of the previous studies mainly focuses on the use of linking adverbials bynon-English major learners in written English, but little attention is paid to theadvanced EFL learners’ use of linking adverbials in spoken English.This study is conducted with the aid of a corpus-based approach and ContrastiveInterlanguage Analysis. Based on SWECCL and BNC, four corpora are established:NNWC, NNSC, NWC and NSC. The study makes the comparison between theadvanced Chinese EFL learners and the native speakers in using linking adverbials inboth written and spoken English and attempts to give a comprehensive description ofthe advanced Chinese EFL learners’ use of linking adverbials. It also aims to analyzeand find out the solutions to the existing problems for English teaching and learning.After the quantitative and qualitative analyses, there are three major findings, asfollows:1) The advanced Chinese EFL learners display a great tendency to overuselinking adverbials in written English. The frequency of each semantic type shows thedistribution of different semantic types is almost the same in the two written corpora.Both groups of writers frequently use roughly the same linking adverbials. However, itseems that the advanced Chinese EFL learners use those more frequently than thenative speakers. All these can be caused by teachers’ instruction and the learners’ L1transfer, learners’ avoiding strategy and their lack of stylistic and register awareness.2) The advanced Chinese EFL learners display a great tendency to underuselinking adverbials in spoken English. The frequency of each semantic type shows thatthe distributions of different semantic types have great differences in the two spokencorpora. Both groups of speakers frequently use roughly the same linking adverbials.However, the learners tend to use them more frequently than the native speakers.3) The difference in the use of linking adverbials between spoken and written English varies between the advanced Chinese EFL learners and the native speakers.Learners tend to use more linking adverbials in their writing than they do in theirspeaking; on the contrary, the native speakers use more linking adverbials in theirspeaking than they do in their writing. It means that the relationship between the use oflinking adverbials and register is still problematic for the advanced Chinese EFLlearners.