A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Connectives In Chinese And Native College Students’ Argumentative Essays

This study is aimed at investigating the use condition of the connectives in Chinese English majors’students’ argumentative essays by Chinese and reveal the difference in use of connectives in theirdistribution features in written English between Chinese English majors’ students and native speakers, toguide the selection of the connectives in second language writing teaching and second language learning,to promote the connectives teaching and learning methods, to improve the ability to select and use, toreduce language errors, to improve using accuracy and expressive fluency in the use of connectives inEnglish writing,Based on COLEC (College Learner English Corpus) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of NativeEnglish Essays), adopting Quirk et al.’s framework and criteria, with COLEC (ST5and ST6) andLOCNESS (part2and Part3) as research samples, this study explores the use of the connectives in ChineseEnglish majors’ students’ argumentative essays respectively with the help of AntConc software and manualfiltering, aiming at three following research questions:1) What is the distribution of connectives used in English argumentative writing in the two samples ofCOLEC and LOCNESS respectively?2) What the similarities and differences of using connectives in English argumentative writingsbetween the Chinese English majors’ students and native speakers?3) Which category of connectives is the most and the least used in Chinese English majors’ students’argumentative writing?The study results show:1) The use of connectives has universality in written English between Chinese English majors’students and native speakers. In all seven categories, the use of connectives in number and in occurrencefrequency are the listing, the contrastive, the resultive, the summative, the inferential, the appositive and thetransitional in turn.2) There exist significant differences in the use of the connectives between Chinese English majors’students and native speakers. Chinese learners overused, underused or misused the connectives in writtenEnglish. In all seven categories, the number and proportion and occurrence frequency of the connectives inCOLEC is by far higher than in LOCNESS. However, In terms of the occurrence frequency, the listing, thecontrastive and the resultive in COLEC are much higher than in LOCNESS, while the inferential, the appositive and the transitional by far lower in COLEC than in LOCNESS. The occurrence frequency of thesummative connectives is the same as each other.3) As to the category of the connectives, in COLEC, the number and the proportion of the listingconnectives is the largest, and the occurrence frequency of the listing connectives is the highest. Thenumber and the proportion of the transitional connectives is the largest, and the occurrence frequency of thetransitional connectives is the highest.Due to the limitation of software and manual filtering themselves, there are a few deviations of thisstudy results. As to some problems above, some suggestions are conducted. Defects in technology andmethods can be overcome as much as possible in further studies, and much practice of the connectivesshould be strengthened in English teaching and learning.