A Corpus-based Study On Conjunction In College English Writing

Writing has always been the most important way of output for English learning, which is an important reflection of the English level of the students and also an integrated part for all kinds of examinations. A good composition should fulfill the following standards: the content should be relevant to the topic; the meaning is fluent; the paragraphs cohere naturally; basically there is no language mistake. Therefore, it's a necessary requirement for writing a good composition to use the cohesive means properly. However, The compositions of college non-English majors often have narrow ideas and loose structures, lack of logic and use conjunctions wrongly, which leads to a bad consistency of the composition and affects the quality of the whole composition. The conjunctions in English play important roles in cohering and linking up the paragraphs as a cohesive mean. With application of the computer as well as the emerge of large corpora and searching softwares, the corpus approach as a new research methods have been increasingly widely used in language teaching research.This paper is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus, aiming at revealing the major types of mistakes made by the students who are not majoring at English. Antconc3.2 is used to applicant CLEC's sub-library St3, St4 in using of the wrong conjunctions, and to figure out their current common error types, as well as provide the possible reasons for errors. At last, the essay gives a model for new college English writing teaching.