A Study Of Conjunction Use In L2 Writing By Doctoral Students In China

The recent few years have witnessed an interest in exploring the use of conjunctions by EFL learners. As an attempt to examine the features as well as problems of conjunction use in L2 writing, and also to explore the relationship between conjunction use and writing quality, this thesis reports a study on the use of conjunctions by sixty Chinese doctoral students in their essays.In this study, both appropriate conjunctions and incorrect conjunctions in the students’ essays were identified and subsequently submitted to quantitative and qualitative analysis by means of manual tagging and extraction. Data analyses have yielded the following findings:1. The doctoral students used a considerable number of conjunctions in their writings. Conjunctions of various types were used with different frequencies. The students employed Enhancement conjunctions most frequently, followed by Extension and Elaboration types. As for conjunction sub-types, the students employed Spatio-temporal devices most frequently, followed by Causal-conditional ties. Manner and Matter conjunctions were rarely used by the students.2. One quarter of the conjunctions used by the doctoral students were problematic. Most of the conjunction errors belonged to Enhancement type, followed by Extension type. The students rarely made errors when using conjunctions for the purpose of Elaboration. Among all conjunction error types, Misuse ranked the first, followed by Underuse and Overuse errors. Among Misuse errors, Inappropriate style and Grammatical mistake errors stood out as the most two prominent error types, followed by Wrong logic errors. Non-matching and Redundancy errors were much less frequent in the students’ writings.3. Both the total frequency of conjunctions and the frequencies of various conjunction types were found to be significantly correlated with the writing quality. The doctoral students with different writing proficiencies differed significantly in their use of conjunctions:the highly-rated essays used more conjunctions than the other essays. Specifically, the highly-rated essays employed significantly more Elaboration and Enhancement devices. As for the sub-types of conjunctions, significant differences were only found in the use of Clarification and Spatio-temporal ties.The above findings have shown the important role of conjunctions in L2 writing and confirm the problematic nature of conjunction use. The major pedagogical implication drawn from this study is that teachers should raise students’conjunction awareness, and draw students’ attention to problems with conjunction use. Moreover, teachers should call students’ attention to functions and conventions of conjunction use. Besides, teachers should also encourage and guide students to use conjunctions in writing process and help them to recognize and reduce their production of inappropriate conjunctions.