The Contrastive Study On The Use Of Causal Connectives In Chinese And American Undergraduates’ Argumentative Writings

Many researches on the use of connectives have been carried out by linguistics from abroad and China. It is investigated that a large proportion of connectives are overused by non-native students in their writings. There are also some contrastive studies on the use of connectives in non-native writers’ writings. In China, some studies among English majors were carried out. It is discovered that English majors apply discourse connectives in their writings consciously. And the use of causal connectives in Chinese English majors’ argumentative writings in different levels from SWECC was analyzed to reveal the distinctive features of the use of causal connectives.Since the use of causal connectives to some extent is related to the coherence and comprehensibility of the essay, the writer attends to further the study in terms of the use of causal connectives of Chinese EFL learners. Accordingly, this study will make a contrastive study on the use of causal connectives in Chinese and American undergraduates’argumentative writing. The data sources are from two little corpora built by the writer, with the assistance of calculation by manual work, the statistics are analyzed. Thus the research results can be drawn upon and the features of the use of causal connectives in Chinese non-English majors are discovered.The results suggest that Chinese non-English majors use much more causal connectives per100words than native students in writing while American college students apply almost as one second causal connectives as Chinese students. However, Chinese EFL learners always focus on limited fixed connectives, such as so and because. Thus the underuse and overuse arise. Besides, as for the position of the causal connectives, there are many differences between them. Chinese non-English majors prefer to apply cause-result pattern when using causal connectives. For adverbial causal connectives, therefore, thus and hence are found at medial position of a clause or sentence, however, native speakers tend to use them at the initial position. For the same prepositional causal connectives studied, both Chinese non-English majors and native college students tend to apply the prepositional causal connectives in the middle of the sentence except as a result of. Chinese learners prefer to use it in the initial position while native students are willing to apply them in the medial place. Last but not least, based on the above findings, some conclusion and pedagogic implications are put forward.