A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Adversative Connectives In English Majors’ Argumentative Writings

As a kind of cohesive devices,connectives play an important role in the construction of English discourse.Connectives can not only reflect the overall structure of the article,but also reveal the author’s ideas.As adversative connectives are used to express concession,emphasis and so on,which is crucial in the cohesion and logical relation of the discourse.Many researchers have studied the use of adversative connectives,and found that some adversative connectives are misused by second language learners.However,there are few studies on English majors’ use of adversative connectives in argumentative writing.The application of adversative connectives in the text reflects students’ writing ability,which has become one of the important aspects in the teaching of English writing.Because English major students have taken at least one year of professional writing courses,with certain language ability,the author carry on a comparative analysis on the usage of adversative connectives between native students and English majors from NUC,then concludes the characteristics of the adversative connectives usage in English majors’ argumentative writings of NUC,and discover the problems that exist presently.In addition,combined with the questionnaire,the author made a survey to analyze the reasons behind these problems.Therefore,the author put forward some suggestions on the teaching of English argumentative writing and the use of adversative connectives,expecting to help English learners improve their argumentative writing ability.Therefore,the corpus analysis method is adopted in this paper.The author has established two small corpus,one of which is the observation corpus,which is composed of 106 English argumentative papers written by sophomores majoring in English in North University of China,with a total of 22,345 words.Another corpus is selected from LOCNESS(Argumentative Corpus of Native English Essays),which was established by professor Granger.It consists of lots of argumentative essays written by American and British college students.In this study,only 112 argumentative writings in native language are selected as reference corpus,with a total of 45,736 words.At the beginning of the study,the author collected texts,extracted a certain amount of texts,then entered,coded and marked the text,after that,scientifically analyzed thedata in the two corpus with the help of AntConc3.3.0.This study aims to answer three questions:1.What’s the current situation of the use of adversative connectives in English majors’ argumentative writings of North University of China?2.What are the similarities and differences about the use of adversative connectives in argumentative writings between English majors in North University of China and native speakers?3.Is there any misuse of adversative connectives in English major’s argumentative writings?The research shows that: 1.In English argumentative writing,English majors of North University of China can use adversative connectives widely,the conjunctive adversative connectives are used most frequently,followed by adverbial adversative connectives,and prepositional adversative connectives are used in the least frequency.2.In argumentative writing,Chinese English majors and native English speakers tend to select similar adversative connectives,and there is no significant difference in the use of adversative connectives between the two Corpus,although some of students may misuse adversative connectives.3.According to the research,English majors lack of discourse awareness in argumentative writing as well as writing is less practiced after class,which leads to the misuse of some simple adversative connectives.In addition,in argumentative writing,English majors may overuse some adversative connectives.For example,the using frequency of “but” “however” “on the other hand” is higher than that of native language learners,while “nevertheless” “even though” are rarely used,and “ unlike” “conversely” “at any rate” are hardly used by Chinese English majors.Therefore,in English argumentative writing teaching,teachers should cultivate students’ cohesion consciousness,improve their ability to use adversative connectives,give positive feedback to students in writing,encourage students to develop the habit of independent learning.Moreover,students should use adversative connectives appropriately in writing and avoid the negative transfer of Chinese.Teachers should explain the classification of adversative connectives in details to enhance students’ ability in adversative connectives usage.In this way,English learners could improve their argumentative writing ability.According to the data,this study put forward some beneficial suggestions for foreign language teaching and English writing.