A Corpus-based Study Of The Use Of Contrastive Connectors Of English Majors' Argumentative Writings In Polytechnic Universities

For college students,English argumentative writings are the literary form that are frequently examined and they should master.And connectors in English,as a kind of cohesive device,play an important role in strengthening the consistency,logicality and persuasive power of argumentative writings.Contrastive connectors therein are also indispensable when different opinions and situations are compared,and the relationship of emphasis or the relationship of concession is expressed.Thus,each college student,especially English major,should be able to use contrastive connectors correctly and appropriately.A number of researches on the use of contrastive connectors also have been made(Chen Jianlin,2010;Chu Lianglong & Zhao Chengfa,2011;Yang Ziqiang,2013,etc.).And it is discovered that Chinese English learners still have some problems in the mastery of contrastive connectors.However,most of the previous studies have a wide range of research objects.Few of them focus on English majors' use of contrastive connectors specifically.Therefore,in order to fill in the research gap to some extent,and to gain a thorough understanding of English majors' mastery of contrastive connectors,this paper,adopting a corpus-based approach,carries out a contrastive analysis of the use of contrastive connectors in argumentative writings between Chinese English majors and English native speakers to find out English majors' use characteristics,especially potential problems.In addition,the paper probes into the root reasons through questionnaires and interviews,aiming to propose some suggestions that are beneficial for the mastery of contrastive connectors and the teaching of English argumentative writings.In this study,two corpora are used.The EFLA Corpus is the self-built English majors' argumentation corpus,which is composed of 300 English argumentative writings by sophomore English majors in Taiyuan University of Technology.And the MA Corpus is the model argumentation corpus,which is made up of 323 argumentative writings in The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)constructed by Professor Sylviane Granger.After the process of entering,coding,and tagging,the author conducted scientific analyses of the text with the aid of AntConc 3.2.4 and SPSS16.0.The results indicate:(1)On the whole,there is no significant difference in the use of contrastive connectors between Chinese English majors and English native speakers.(2)As for the specific contrastive connectors,the most frequently used contrastive connectors of English majors is “but”,“while” moderately and “though”,“yet”,but“whereas” relatively less frequently.(3)English majors overuse some contrastive connectors such as “but”,“however”,etc.and underuse some ones like “conversely,nevertheless,alternatively”,“items”,etc.(4)Except certain contrastive connectors which are used in fixed position,English majors tend to put contrastive connectors at the beginning of sentences,while English native speakers choose the position more flexibly.(5)Various factors including English majors' acquired knowledge and learning attitude result in their improper use of contrastive connectors.Based on the above research results,the author proposes that in the teaching of English argumentative writings,the teacher should put more emphasis on its significance,teach more knowledge about discourse,give the systematical and detailed explanation to contrastive connectors and other kinds of connectors,and thereby lead English majors to use various connectors flexibly.