A Study On The Use Of Connectives In English Compositions By Senior High School Students

This study was undertaken to investigate the use of connectives by senior high school students in their English compositions. The theoretical bases of this study are cohesion and coherence, and interlanguage. The significance of the study is to find out the features of the connectives used in these senior high school students’ English compositions so that teachers could help students to establish textual coherence in their English compositions by teaching connective knowledge.The research questions addressed in this study are as follows:1. What is the general pattern of connectives used in English compositions by senior high school students?2. Are there any differences in the use of connectives between the high-level group and the low-level group? If yes, what are the differences?3. What is the relationship between the use of connectives and scores of English writings of senior high school students?Participants were94students from Sihong Senior High School in Jiangsu province. The instrument of this study was an English writing test, which was given at the writing classes on Oct.26,2013. When classes were over,94compositions were collected by their writing teachers, but only90compositions were found valid. Data analysis involved double scoring, division of groups, and comparison. All the compositions were scored by two experienced teachers with the writing rubric of NMET in Jiangsu province. Then the data were divided into three groups according to the writing scores and the writing rubric. Independent-samples t-test analysis and correlation analysis were employed in this study.This study has yielded the following major findings:Firstly, senior high school students use8types of connectives in their compositions, with additive connectives (47.6%) ranking the first, followed by enumeration connectives (16.8%) and contrast/concession connectives (12.5%), and condition connectives (1.8%) comes the last. And those connectives which are simple, logical and learned in students’early ages, such as and, also, firstly, secondly, but, however, and while are used frequently in students’compositions.Secondly, there is a significant difference in frequency of the use of connectives between the high-level group and low-level group, which may result from the more use of enumeration connectives (p=.001<05) and contrast/concession connectives (p=.017<.05) by the high-level group. There is also a significant difference in variety of the use of connectives between the high-level group and the low-level group in enumeration connectives (p=.047<.05) and contrast/concession connectives (p=.002<.05). This can be illustrated with more varieties used by the high-level group, like for one thing, for another, in the first place, in the second place, first of all, and last but not least in enumeration connectives and though, however, on the contrary, but, on (the) one hand, on the other hand, and while in contrast/concession connectives.Finally, the frequency of the use of connectives in students’English compositions and their scores are positively correlated, with r=.370and p=.000, which may be due to the positive correlation between the frequency of contrast/concession connectives and apposition connectives with English writing scores at the.046and.047levels and their coefficients,.211and.210respectively. There is also a positive correlation between the variety of use of connectives and students’writing scores, with r=.295and p=.005, which may result from the positive correlation between the variety of contrast/concession connectives with English writing scores at the significance level.001, and the coefficients is.336.This study provides some implications. Firstly, teachers should take measures to make students realize the importance and practical value of connectives through systematically introducing these connectives to them. Secondly, teachers should pay more attention to the low-level group, give them more chances to practice connectives and constantly remind them to use various connectives in the process of doing English writing. Thirdly, teachers should more frequently introduce to the students those connectives of high correlation to English writing score.There were three limitations in the present study. Firstly, the sample size is not large enough to be generalized to the whole population. Secondly, the writing type is limited to make the research field incomprehensive, for the topic of the writing was given. Thirdly, no qualitative research was conducted to investigate the participants’opinions and feelings, which might not make this study more scientific and complete.