Developmental Features Of Contrastive Connectives In Chinese English Learner’s Academic Writing

Since the 1980 s, the research on L2 writing has attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad. The aspects of coherence and cohesion, syntactic complexity and lexical features are mainly concerned. Discourse analysis with cohesion and coherence has roused the interests of many linguists, who focus on the construction of semantic coherence by conhesive divices, and how to help the language learners to comprehend and produce coherent discourse.There have been a number of studies focusing directly on the use of adverbial conjuncts in writing. A substantial amount of previous researches have been carried out on the analysis of logical connectives usage in learners’ writing, yet most of them investigate the use of logical connectives in short essays written by undergraduates. Only few researches focus on the use of connectives in EFL learners’ academic writing and the developmental features of the use of contrastive connectives(CCs), even fewer in the context of China. For that reason, this study is about developmental features of CCs in learner’s academic discourse, using three corpora including Chinese English major BA corpus, Chinese English major MA corpus and Chinese English major PhD corpus.The research questions are as follows:(1) What are the frequency features of CCs used in the academic writing of Chinese EFL undergraduate students, postgraduate students and doctoral students?(2) What are the features of semantic distribution of CCs used in the academic writing of Chinese EFL undergraduate students, postgraduate students and doctoral students?(3) What are the developmental features of CCs using by learners in these three different levels?This study has been conducted through several steps: First of all, three corpora are built. They are English major BA corpus, English major MA corpus and English major PhD corpus. Secondly, the research objects are determined. We use the CCs listed by Hyland(2000), referring to the framework given both by Halliday & Hasan(1976) and Biber et al.(2000). Thirdly, data-processing softwares are chosen. AntConc 3.5.2 and Chi-Square Calculator are involved. They are used to get the frequency information of CCs and to find the differences of CCs in three corpora. At last, the semantic features in context are observed and classified and at the same time the using features of CCs in academic discourse in different learning stages are summarized. The results are as follows:The frequency features can be concluded from three aspects. Firstly, as to the overall frequency, BA students use the most of the CCs compared with MA students and PhD students. The MA students use the least of the CCs. The reason may be that the BA students misuse some CCs or they only use CCs to express the relationship between propositions, whereas the MA students and Ph D students use other ways to express the adversative relationship. Secondly, the top five CCs used in BA corpus, MA corpus and PhD corpus are but, however, while, although, even though / though. In BA corpus and MA corpus, the frequency of these five CCs is over 90%. It means that CCs used by BA and MA students are concentrated. The PhD students use more variety of CCs than BA and MA students. Thirdly, compared with MA students, BA students overuse but, however, on the contrary. Compared with PhD students, MA students overuse on the contrary and underuse but, even though/ though, yet, whereas.As to the semantic features, CCs can express the adversative relations and the concessive relations between sentences. All of the BA, MA and PhD students use more connectives that express adversative relations than that express concessive relations. When comparing the BA corpus with the MA corpus, the author finds that BA students tend to overuse CCs that express adversative relation, but there are no significant differences in using concessive CCs in BA corpus and MA corpus. When comparing the MA corpus with PhD corpus, the author finds that the MA students use significantly fewer CCs that express both adversative and concessive relations than PhD students do.As to the developmental features, the overall frequency of CCs used by BA students is the highest. The PhD students come to the second and the MA students the third. The varieties of CCs used by BA and MA students are limited, the PhD students can use more CCs to express the adversative relations. It means that with the improvement of English levels, learners of high levels can use more diversity of CCs. In semantic level, BA, MA and PhD students use more connectives that express adversative relations and fewer connectives that express concessive relations.The possible causes for these characteristics of developmental features can be found as a result of teachers’ instructions, pedagogy, writing strategy, readers’ awareness and so on. Also, there is a positive correlation between the use of CCs and the writing quality. The results indicated that a good piece of academic writing is featured by numbers and diversity of CCs.