A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of Causal Conjunctions Used By Chinese College Non-English Majors

The present study is a corpus-based study of causal conjunctions used by Chinese college non-English majors. The motivation derives from the importance of causal conjunctions in discourse cohesion and coherence, and the great difference between the use of causal conjunctions by Chinese EFL learners and that by native speakers. Based on the research of conjunctions in previous studies, this is a micro study of causal conjunctions, with the target learners limited to Chinese college non-English majors.With the purpose to find out the characteristics of causal conjunctions used by Chinese college non-English majors, the paper analyzes causal conjunctions in the following aspects: the overall frequency, the frequently used causal conjunctions, causal conjunctions overused and underused, and their positions and patterns. The paper tries to find out the differences between Chinese college non-English majors and native speakers, and the underlying causes of the differences. The ultimate purpose is to provide feedback information for college English teaching and benefit related teaching and research practices.The study takes large amounts of language materials produced by Chinese English learners from two sub-corpora of Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC), that is, st3 and st4. It uses as comparable corpora the British National Corpus (BNC), and the College English Course Corpus provided by my supervisor Zhang Yang. Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Error Analysis are used in the study of the concordance lines of the selected causal conjunctions. The causal conjunctions under study are first selected and classified according to studies previously conducted by other scholars; second, with the help of retrieval tools, raw frequencies of causal conjunctions are collected and the ambiguous causal conjunctions are distinguished according to the contextual information; the analysis of the positions and patterns of causal conjunctions begins with the classification of positions and patterns, and then the frequency of each kind of position and pattern is extracted manually. With such data collected, the author has carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the subject matter. The following are the major findings of the study. 1) The use of causal conjunctions is higher in intensity and lower in variety by Chinese college non-English majors than that by native speakers. It seems that Chinese college non-English majors have difficulty in distinguishing the stylistic features of specific causal conjunctions. There exist great differences between the students and native speakers in the positions and patterns, and the students tend to imitate the exact form but ignore the meaning of the form. Moreover, the mixture of word class of causal adverbs and causal conjuncts and the redundant use of causal conjunctions are also among the most obvious mistakes in writings by Chinese college non-English majors.2) With the improvement of English proficiency, the students'use of causal conjunctions will become more native-like.3) The data from the teaching material corpus shows that the textbooks do not reflect the full features of the use of causal conjunctions by native speakers and therefore need to be supplemented with extra materials.The present paper summarizes the following main causes of the characteristics shown in the use of causal conjunctions by the students: L1 transfer, input bias, overgeneralization and avoidance strategy.In short, the present study illustrates the characteristics of the use of causal conjunctions by Chinese college non-English majors, and investigates the underlying causes. It is believed that the study will benefit college English teaching concerning causal conjunctions.