A Corpus-based Study On Use Of Linking Adverbials In Chinese High School Students’ English Writings

Linking adverbials (LAs) as discourse markers, if used appropriately, can improve the cohesion and coherence of the discourse. Learning to use LAs properly is an important part of second language learning. However, there are signs that there are various problems in LA usage in Chinese high school students’writings, which affects the essays’quality. Therefore it is necessary to study on it. This study adopts a corpus-based approach, taking the native speakers’corpus for contrast to investigate the use of LAs by Chinese high school students and their overall level of LAs acquisition, with the focus on the circumstances of overuse, underuse and misuse of frequently used LAs. The causes of the problematic use of LAs are also surveyed.Taking the essays of one 2014 mock English entrance exam in the capital city of certain province as the sampling source, the researcher randomly collected 360 files of the essays, which were evenly distributed at high, middle and low level, to set up the Chinese High School Students’Essay Corpus (CHSSEC). Meanwhile 323 essays of the same genre in LONCESS were collected to set up the native speakers’essay corpus. Then 159 frequently used LAs were selected as the target LAs and searched one by one in the two corpora by AntConc. Based on the contextual information, the cases of non-linking adverbial were screened; various functions of LAs were identified and the frequency of each LA with identified functions was calculated. Then the statistical data in two corpora were comparatively analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. In addition, a web-based interview to 29 high school English teachers of various schools and 1 researcher was made to find out the possible reasons for the problematic LA use by Chinese high school students. The findings of the study include:1. The overall frequency of LAs by Chinese high school students are much higher than that of native English speakers; the frequencies of adversative LAs and subcategories of Exemplification, Apposition, Cause/reason, Purpose and Transition by Chinese high school students are similar to that of native English speakers and they show different preference for the top 15 LAs.2. Of the 159 frequently used LAs,60 are significantly overused and 64 underused. Chinese high school students tend to rely heavily on some of the LAs.3. The overused LAs are mainly distributed in:1) Additive and Sequential catorgories;2) subcategories of Addition, Contrast/Conflict, Logical Sequence and Summation, with the frequencies(per million) of Addition and Logical Sequence relation much higher than that by native speakers.4. The underused LAs are mainly distributed in:l) Causal/resutltative category;2) subcategories of Reference, Similarly, Concession, Dismissal, Replacement, Cause/Reason, Condition, with the frequencies (per million) of Similarly and Dismissal relation nearly 0.5. Misuse of certain LAs by Chinese high school students are found mainly in four aspects: 1) semantical misuse, that is, the meanings of LAs do not fit the real relationship between the two units to be linked; 2) syntactic misuse, which involves misunderstanding of syntactic property or structure of LAs so leading to syntactical problemss;3) inappropriately use in register, that is, overusing LAs which frequently used in spoken language(e.g. besides, what’s more) in essays and tending to place LAs sentence-initially; 4)surface logicality, that is, LAs are sometimes are deliberately used between parts without any logical relations or where LAs are not needed, thus causing improper discourse marking.6. Regarding the causes of problematic use of LAs by Chinese high school students, first, it is indeed difficult for acquisition due to the complexity of LAs, and due to L1 interference both in written or spoken language and overgeneralization of LAs’ function; second, the problems are related to instructional factors which include the insufficient and simplex input of LAs in teaching, the exam-oriented teaching materials and teachers’ own limited knowledge of LAs.This author proposes some suggestions for the LA teaching and the future work on LAs based on the findings.