An Empirical Study Of Connectives In College English Writing

Connectives play a significant role in making the discourse more coherent.However,a great number of studies manifest that the use of connectives is problematic,especially for the foreign language learners.Although Chinese college English learners have acquired a certain level of vocabulary,they still have difficulties in writing a coherent discourse.Based on the cohesion theories by Halliday and previous research about connectives,this study probes further into the current situation of the use of connectives among college students and explores possible reasons in hope of improving writing teaching.This research adopts both quantitative and qualitative approach in analyzing the data.The author analyzes 320 compositions which are written by 160 college students in China University of Petroleum.The students participating are from different majors and with different English proficiencies.160 of the compositions are collected when the students are in their first year of college while the others are collected one year later.And among each of the 160 compositions: 80 are written by students with relatively high English proficiencies and 80 are written by students with relatively low English proficiencies.Then comparisons have been made between those writings.In this study,the researcher classifies the connectives into 9 types based on Quirk and Biber's classification and studies the characteristics of the writings in the use of connectives.Finally,some possible reasons and pedagogical implications are discussed.The result of the research shows that there exist uneven semantic distributions among the 9 types of connectives in college English writing.The most frequently used connectives are listing connectives.Top 10 frequently used connectives are discussed.From the results,we can see the connectives students used are tending to be less in variety.By comparison of the writings of the first year and the second year,the semantic distributions are similar while the overall frequencies of connectives decrease after a year's study.Besides,students with relatively high English proficiencies tend to use more connectives than those with relatively low English proficiencies.After the analysis of the questionnaires and interviews,some possible reasons are discussed for the above phenomena.At the end of the thesis,some useful pedagogical implications for English teaching are proposed in order to improve students writing ability.