A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Adverbial Connectors In English Majors’ Academic Theses

Adverbial connectors as one kind of cohesive devices play animportant role in improving coherence and clarity in English writing, butstudies have shown that even advanced EFL learners have problems inusing them appropriately. Based on the previous studies, the author of thisthesis conducts a more detailed comparative study with the aid of acorpus approach, aiming to explore the differences in the use of adverbialconnectors between non-native learners and native learners as well as thedifferences between two non-native learner corpora at different Englishproficiency levels.On the basis of the three self-established corpora (two non-nativelearner corpora and one native learner corpus), the author decides toretrieve100English adverbial connectors for study and classifies theminto seven semantic categories according to Biber et al.’s (2000)classification of adverbial connectors. After the observation of theiroverall frequencies, their distribution in terms of semantic classificationand the contextual information of certain adverbial connectors, the authorconducts a Chi-squared test to see whether the most frequent connectorsare over-/under-used by the Chinese learners as compared to the nativelearners. The results show that there exists an overall higher frequency inthe Chinese learners’ writing and the categories of enumeration andaddition, result/inference and transition are overused by the Chinese learners. Furthermore, compared with the native learners, the Chineselearners tend to overuse some informal or familiar adverbial connectors.After examining the contextual information of certain adverbialconnectors, the author finds that some adverbial connectors are redundantor mechanically used by the Chinese learners. Such tendencies may relateto teachers’ instructions, the selection of specific textbooks, the EFLlearners’ mother tongue influence and their lack of stylistic and readers’awareness.The present research sheds some light on teaching English writingand provides some references for Chinese EFL learners’ academic writing.It is of some significance for the appropriate use of English adverbialconnectors.