A Corpus-Based Research On Discourconnectors In Senior English Majors’ Writing

This thesis is a corpus-based research on discourse connectors in senior Englishmajors’ writing, and its purpose is to discover the similarities and distinctions indiscourse use in argumentative writing between Chinese advanced EFL learners andEnglish-native speakers. Corpus for English Major (CEM) is adopted as the learnercorpus (LC) because argumentative writings of senior English majors collected in CEMare regarded as the representative of interlanguage learned by Chinese advanced EFLlearners. And the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) isadopted as the native corpus (NC) because it has the comparable propertiesContrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) requires. The list of connectors is thesynthesis of connector list in Quirk et al.(1985) and that in Bolton et al.(2002),excluding those connectors never appearing NC or LC. The standardized frequency(SF) of individual connector as a variable shows ratio of occurrence of a certainconnector per1000sentences.The findings indicate that upper-level English majors tend to use moreconnectors with higher vocabulary richness than native counterparts, whileaverage-level English majors use fewer connectors with a smaller variety due to theirlimited vocabulary. And Chinese senior English majors, both the upper-level and theaverage-level, have a tendency to overuse listing and summative connectors,whereas they underuse contrastive and corroborative connectors compared withnative counterparts. The following factors lead to the differences:1) Chinese students are inclined to develop an essay via listing a series ofsupporting points rather than refute the opposite viewpoint to support their stances.2) Chinese students make a conclusion of an essay with a summative connectorwhile native speakers conclude their writing naturally with evidence and supportingpoints.3) The traditional Chinese culture encourages people to find golden meanbetween the two extremes, which completely contrasts to the meaning expressedthrough corroborative connectors. 4) English teachers in all kinds of schools discourage the use of colloquiallymarked corroborative connectors, such as of course, indeed and in fact in the formalgenre.In addition, Chinese senior English majors and native speakers rely on the sameconnectors in their writing, namely but, so, or and also. Both native and Chinesestudents are lacking in awareness of style-sensitivity of discourse connectors becausethe mixed use of formal and informal connectors happens in their writing. AndChinese students are inclined to underuse some contrastive connectors preferred bynative ones, such as still, instead and rather.And the thesis analyzes the use of what’s/is more, moreover and on thecontrary in high-score group in CEM (HSG) and low-score group in CEM (LSG) in detailand discovers that the overuse of them results from the misuse of them.Some pedagogical implications are proposed as well. Upper-level senior Englishmajors should pay more attention to figuring out the exact context of using anindividual connector so as to avoid misusing fallible connectors. The average-levelstudents should not only have a good command of fallible connectors but alsoenlarge their vocabulary, especially discourse connectors so as to improve vocabularyrichness in their writing rather than rely on limited connectors. English teachers aresupposed to introduce more writing strategies to students considering that mostChinese students only list supportive evidence and viewpoints during argumentativewriting.