A Study Of The Use Of Causal Connectors In English Majors’ Argumentative Writings

To English major students, argumentative writing is one of the important parts of Test for English Major Band4(TEM-4). Causal connectors play a significant role in argumentative writings. Proper use of causal connectors could enhance the cohesiveness and persuasion in argumentative writings. Although many researchers have conducted researches into causal connectors, few researchers have tried to study the use of causal connectors inTEM-4argumentative writings.Therefore, the author of the present study analyses the features of causal connectors in English major students’ argumentative writings and pointing out the deep-rooted reasons of these features through questionnaire. Finally, the author gives some suggestions for argumentative writing teaching so as to improve English major students’ writing proficiency. This study contains two corpora:one is English majors’ argumentation corpus, the other is model argumentation corpus. The former corpus includes100argumentations from two different simulated TEM-4tests of section A for second-year English major students in a university in Taiyuan. The latter corpus includes100argumentations from A Winning Approach to TEM-4Writing written by Nike Stirk. Both of them are self-built corpora. The analysis instruments are AntConc3.2.4and SPSS16.0.The results are:1. According to the analysis of the overall features of causal connectors in English majors’ argumentations and model argumentations, it can be seen that causal connectors in EMA are much lager than that in MA. This result indicates that English major students have already known to use causal connectors to express cause-effect relations in argumentations.2. From the types of causal connectors, both English major students and native speakers prefer to use causal adverbs and causal conjuncts on a large amount, however, English majors tend to use simple words learnt at early stage.3. As for the position and pattern of causal connectors, there is a significant difference between English majors and native experts. English students have a stronger tendency to put them in the initial poison than that of native speakers. The analysis of the pattern of causal connectors shows that English major students tend to use the simple patterns. Besides, the misuse of causal connectors and colloquial tendency are common in English majors’ argumentations.4. The factors influencing English majors’use of causal connectors in argumentations are mainly their awareness and their knowledge of causal connectors.Based on these results, the present study offers four suggestions for English writing teaching:1.Emphasizing discourse knowledge in reading and writing teaching.2. Systematically introducing the knowledge of causal connectors to students.3. Offering a large amount of causal connector instances and more argumentation writing exercises.4. Promoting English majors’ awareness of argumentation writings.