English Majors Native Language Learners And The Use Of Contrast

The coordinating conjunction and has ranked as one of the most frequently used words in English. Most previous studies on the coordinating conjunction and tend to have a discussion from theoretical perspectives, which have failed to provide a full picture of how the coordinating conjunction and is used by English learners. By adopting a corpus-based approach, this study presents a comprehensive description of Chinese English major learners'normal use of the coordinating conjunction and, compared to that of native English speakers. The research questions in this study are:(1) What are the frequency and distributional patterns on the use of the coordinating conjunction and in Chinese English major learners'argumentative essays, compared with those of native English speakers?(2) What are the similarities and differences between the distributional patterns? What are the implications to EFL teaching?This study first developed a research framework, covering 7 types of connotation and 5 levels of coordination linked by the coordinating conjunction and. Then the appropriate coordination in the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) were retrieved, picked up, manually coded, grouped, tabulated and finally formed into distributional patterns for the comparison of similarities and differences. The major findings are:(1) The frequency and distributional patterns for connotation types in the WECCL and the LOCNESS are similar, but Chronological Sequence is overused whereas Contrast and Concession are underused by English major learners. (2) On the comparison of levels of coordination, the general distributional patterns are partly different. However, the sub-levels of coordination have revealed less variability. The overused types are Coordination of independent clauses, Coordinated pre-modifiers, Coordination of adjectives and adjective phrases and Coordination of adverbs and adverb phrases. The underused ones are Coordination of Prepositional complement, Coordination of Subject, Coordination of prepositions and preposition phrases and Coordinated post-modifiers.The possible causes for the overuse or underuse types can be related to the syntactic transfer from L1 (e.g. more and more), the overuse of the sentence-initial and, improper learning strategies and learners English proficiency. This study therefore suggests that English teachers'attention is needed to draw on the overused or underused types so as to seek solutions for a balance. It is also advocated that English teachers can have access to corpora and concordancers. With the availability of these modern analytic tools,"consciousness-raising"exercises can be utilized in English classrooms, helpful for inviting learners'more active participation on the overuse and underuse problems.