A Corpus-based Analysis Of Use Of But And However By Chinese Learners Of English In Their Argumentative Writings

This thesis reports a study that was intended to investigate the use of the contrastive connectives of but and however by Chinese learners of English in their argumentative writings, with a primary focus on the characteristics of use of but and however, with a secondary focus on learners'misuse, over- and under-use of the two synonymous words, and with a tertiary focus on the differences in the use of but and however between learners of different writing proficiency levels, in attempt to find out the correlation between use of but and however and the learners'writing ability and the power of use of but and however, if any, to predict learners'writing ability.The data used in this study was retrieved from St4, the sub-corpus of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) was used as a reference corpus. According to the research objective, the learners were divided into higher- and lower-group on the basis of the writing scores they obtained in CET-6 Test. This study adopts a quantitative approach to the corpus-based data, combined with analysis of some typical cases. The method of analysis falls in the realm of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). The statistical calculation and analysis yielded the following findings:Firstly, The frequencies of use of but and however in CLEC reveals that Chinese learners tend to use more but than however in their argumentative writings, and that but was overused and however was underused in comparison with native speakers'use of the two words. In addition, Chinese learners tend to use but in the initial position of the sentence as a sentence-initial coordinator, while however always occurs in the initial position. This suggests that the learners tend to use but to introduce the simple sentences to organize their ideas probably in order to avoid unnecessary errors in a testing context. Other possible explanation may go to the phenomenon that the Chinese learners'writings are likely to be affected by their speech.The Chinese learners'misuse of but and however may be attributed to the L1 interference, which can be illustrated by such a typical error as in"although…, but…", and to the learners'low degree of awareness of syntactic structures and register differences, as in high occurrences of misuse of but or mixed use of but and however.Secondly, the results of the Chi-square test indicate that there is a significant difference in the frequency of use of but and its misuse between higher- and lower-groups, that is, the lower-group overused or misused but in comparison with higher-group, suggesting that such a difference is manifested by the learners'misuse of syntactic structures and register awareness. Interestingly, the difference was not found in the use of however between the learners of different levels, but both groups almost unanimously used however in the initial position. Such a result implies that Chinese learners tend to use simplest word in their writing tests to assure a good score.Thirdly, the results of correlation analysis show that the frequencies of use of but and however are negatively correlated to the learners'writing performance. Furthermore, the results of the multivariate digression conducted in the data analysis indicates that the frequency of misuse of but may have a strong predicting power on their writing performance in a testing context, and that over-use of but has some power to predict the learners'writing performance, but at an insignificant level. Due to the small token used by Chinese learners, the under-use of however has no predicting power to writing performance. This partially explains why the learners have not acquired lexico-grammatical knowledge to deal with the problems they have encountered in the process of writing.This study has the following pedagogical implications: 1) L2 writing teaching activities should negotiate meaning-focused instruction with form-focused instruction. 2) The acquisition of synonymous words should be extended to the discourse level. 3) The use of such words as but and however may help us to gain an overall understanding of the learners'writing proficiency, both on the lexical and discourse levels.