A Corpus-based Study On The Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of Connectors

Discourse production requires various types of competence ranging fromgrammatical competence to discourse competence. Connectors which are used to signalrelations existing between sentences and parts of a given text, are quite essential for theproduction of cohesive and coherent discourses. Connectors can facilitate readers’prediction process and guide readers to move forward and backward within a given text.There are mainly three topics popular among previous studies on connectors, namely,frequency, classification and context-bound appropriateness of use. In consideration ofthe importance of connectors, this study focuses on connectors use of Chinese EFLlearners at different proficiency levels by comparing with that of native speakers so asto enlighten the present English teaching and learning.The five corpora involved are ST3and ST6from CLEC, NEC from LOCNESSand the self-created corpora of CDC and NDC. In the data analysis process, thesoftware Antconc3.2.1is used to retrieve connectors to get the overall occurrences ofconnectors in each corpus. In order to make the results more persuasive, bothquantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted.The results indicate that: first, Chinese EFL learners tend to use more connectors intheir writings than their counterparts, but it can not be called “overuse”; second, theoccurrence of each category in the five corpora indicates that there is no big differencebetween Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the use of connectors to structuretheir essays in terms of semantic distribution; third, as for top ten connectors in eachcorpus, most of the connectors are the same ones; last, there are mainly two types ofproblematic use of connectors in Chinese EFL learners’ writings, namely, redundant useand misuse.The results reveal that Chinese EFL learners have already realized and understoodthe importance of connectors. But they lay too much reliance on connectors to constructtexts. With the aim to make a good impression but relatively limited linguisticcompetence, they may anxiously feel a greater need to construct a coherent and logicaltext by using connectors. This paper also concludes that not full understanding ofconnectors’ functions, negligence of the subtle differences between connectors andinsufficient explanations of textbooks are three possible causes of problematic use of connectors. Therefore, English teachers should enhance students’ awareness ofconnectors’ functions and design course specifically.