A Study Of Logical Connectors In English Majors’Argumentative Writings

To English majors, argumentative compositions are an important part of Test for English Majors Band4(TEM-4). However, writing has been a weak skill of Chinese students, so their grades are relatively low. Coherence is considered to be one of the most important criteria of measuring the quality of compositions, and coherence of a composition is closely related to the use of a variety of cohesive devices. Logical connectors, as an important and most frequently used cohesive device, can be used to indicate the logical relations between words, phrases and sentences in compositions, so that the whole text will be more coherent. Although many researchers at home and abroad have conducted research into logical connectors, in the field of English discourse, very few researchers have tried to do research into the use of logical connectors in TEM-4argumentative writings.Therefore, in this study, the author analyses the characteristics of logical connectors in English majors’argumentative writing and points out the reason of those features through questionnaire so as to give useful suggestions for argumentations teaching, making for English majors’ high argumentations proficiency. The current study contains two corpora, the one is English majors’argumentations corpus (the observed corpus), the other is model argumentations corpus (the reference corpus). The former includes60argumentative writings, collecting from mock TEM-4writing test papers of Section A in2012for second-year English majors at Polytechnic institute Taiyuan university of Technology; the latter is also made up60argumentations,55of which from A Winning Approach to TEM4Writing by Stirk (2009), and5of which from A Winning Approach to TEM4(2002-2011) by Mi (2011). The analysis instruments used in current research are Wconcord software, AntConc3.2.4and SPSS16.0.The results indicate:1. From the analysis of the overall feature of logical connectors in English majors’argumentations and model argumentations, it can be found that logical connectors account for7.35%of total words of EMAC and5.13%of total words of MAC. These results show that English majors have already known to use connector to express the logical relations between sentences and paragraphs to reads consciously.2. English majors most frequently logical connectors belong to three semantic types:listing, resultive and contrastive; transitional, inferential and corroboration logical connectors are seldom used.3. Compared with specific logical connector in each semantic type between EMAC and MAC, English majors always use the simplest logical connectors learned in the early age, and lack of diversity.4. The factors influencing English majors’ use of logical connectors are mainly their attitudes towards argumentative writing and knowledge of discourse and logical connectors in argumentations.Based on these results of all the analyses, this current study offers four suggestions for English writing teaching:1. Emphasizing discourse knowledge in teaching reading and writing.2. Systematically introducing the knowledge of logical connectors to students.3. Using connectives in proper and prudent ways.4. Providing sufficient proper language input.