A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Conjunctions In English Continuation Tasks

As a means of discourse cohesion,English conjunctions play an important role in textual cohesion and coherence.However,a large number of studies have shown that learners who speak English as a foreign language often overuse or underuse some conjunctions.There have been a lot of studies on the use of conjunctions in the past,but few researchers have explored the use of conjunctions in the topic of continuation tasks in high schools.It is the main attempt of this paper to study the following three questions:1.What are the general characteristics of using conjunctions used by Chinese high school students when they complete their continuation writing tasks(type of conjunctions,frequency of use,position in sentences)?2.Are there any significant differences in the use of conjunctions between Chinese high school students who have higher,medium and lower scores in Continuation Tasks? If so,what are the differences(type of conjunctions,frequency of use,etc)? What are the possible reasons?3.In terms of the use of conjunctions,are there any differences between the writings of Chinese high school students and those written by English native students?If so,what are the differences(type of conjunctions,frequency of use,overuse and underuse)? What are the reasons?This paper used a corpus-based research method to collect the essays written by senior one students in a high school and set up a small annotated corpus(CTCCL)to explore the overall situation of using conjunctions.At the same time,by comparing the use of conjunctions in higher,medium and lower groups,we found the similarities and differences on the aspects of conjunction types and positions among different groups of students,and explored the relationship between the quality of students' writings and the use of conjunctions by calculating One-Way ANOVA in SPSS.Finally,by comparing the writings of Chinese students and English native speakers,we gained the features of using conjunctions in different groups,found out the gaps in their use of English conjunctions,explored possible causes,and revealed whetherthere is any overused or underused conjunctions.At the same time,the main findings of this study are as follows:1.Chinese high school students frequently use Listing,Contrastive and Causal connections,while the conjunctions of Transitional,Summative,Appositional and Inferential are used less.Moreover,the number of top 10 conjunctions accounts for83.23% of all conjunctions,which indicates that high school students lack a large variety of conjunctions.2.By comparing the continuation essays of the higher,medium and lower groups of Chinese students,it is found that although the most commonly used conjunctions in three groups are basically the same,students with high scores tend to use conjunctions more frequently and use more conjunction types.For the same conjunction,the higher the student's writing score,the smaller the proportion of students using it.3.The Bivariate Correlation was calculated in SPSS in order to reveal the relationship between the frequency of conjunctions in lower,medium and higher groups and students' writing scores.The results show that the coefficient value is0.778,and there is a high correlation between the frequency of conjunctions and students' achievement of Continuation Tasks.4.By comparing the use of conjunctions of Chinese EFL learners and English Native students,we find that the two corpora have the same characteristics as narrative,that is,there are more Listing,Contrastive,Causal and Transitional words to promote the development of the story.However,English native students use more types of conjunctions in their writings.5.Compared with English native students,the overused conjunctions existed in the composition of Chinese high school students,and the log-likelihood value reached23.06.Among them,the Listing,Causal and Transitional conjunctions were obviously overused,while the Summative,Appositional,Inferential and Contrastive relations have underused conjunctions.The contents and results of this study have some implications for the application of conjunctions and continuation tasks in English teaching,which can increase theunderstanding of teachers and students on continuation tasks.For example,teachers can use retrieval function in softwares to list all kinds of errors in students' compositions,retrieve conjunctions in native speaker's articles,and list examples for students.Students can also compare Chinese logical connectors with English conjunctions to explore the impact of mother tongue transfer.In addition,there are also some deficiencies in this research,and the author also put forward prospects for subsequent research in view of these factors.