Research On The Connector Usage In Journal Papers Based On The Theory Of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis

In the period of globalization, English has become“lingua franca”in theinternational academic community. Academic English writing proficiency is thereforeclosely related to researchers’participation in the international scientificcommunication. Unfortunately, Chinese researchers’low English level has alreadyinfluenced worldwide recognition of their research findings. Western scholars oftencomplain that Chinese researchers have a general tendency to lack logic, cohesion andcoherence in their scientific papers. Connectors, as one of the main cohesive ties, playan essential role in achieving coherence. However, a number of studies have shownthat the use of connectors is problematic in non-native writers’English articles.Chinese authors’writing is no exception. Most previous studies lay stress on thewritten discourse produced by undergraduate and postgraduate students but fewresearchers investigate the connector usage in scientific journal papers. Given all ofthat, the author compares the connectors employed by Chinese authors with thoseused by English native authors in scientific journal papers in this study.Two corpora are built which respectively consist of journal papers written inEnglish by Chinese authors and English native authors working on topics in the fieldof geography. With the help of the concordance tool, the author examines the overallfrequency and variety of connectors in the two corpora which are compared with eachother to look at the semantic and positional distribution of connectors. The author alsoattaches emphasis to the usage of several individual connectors including the top 10high-frequency connectors of each corpus and significantly overused and underusedconnectors in Chinese author corpus. In order to draw meaningful and comprehensiveconclusions, the author integrates quantitative research method which reveals theconnector usage by a series of data and qualitative research approach that explainshow connectors are actually used by different groups of authors.Chinese authors and English native authors have been shown to differ from each other in the connector usage in the following aspects: overall frequency and variety,distribution of semantic relations and positions. Compared with their counterparts,Chinese authors have a low frequency of using connectors and using more variety ofconnectors instead. It has been argued that these differences may be the outcomes ofseveral factors such as first language transfer, language proficiency and registerawareness. As for the usage of individual connectors, the two groups of authors haveshown similar preference for the frequently used connectors. It is also found that thefeatures of overuse and underuse of several connectors by Chinese authors coincidewith the findings of the overall tendency of connector usage.Finally, this paper points out that the different usage of connectors betweenChinese authors and English native authors have pedagogical implications for theteaching of academic English writing in China. More precise explanation along withextensive authentic materials should be promoted in the English academic writingcourses.