A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Connectives In English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Writing,as an intricate cognitive output activity,is usually considered as the most difficult part in English teaching.English Curriculum Standards of General High School(2020)points out that one of the requirements for language skills is that students can be able to use connectives,demonstrative pronouns,lexical cohesion and other linguistic means to build up logical relationships in written expression.Connectives,being one of the most explicit means of connection,play an important role in the cohesion and coherence of a text.However,in the actual teaching of writing,teachers attach much importance to the accuracy of students’ syntax and grammar,but often ignore the cohesion and coherence of the content.Besides,there also exist many problems in students’ use of connectives in their writing.Therefore,based on cohesion theory and error analysis theory,this paper divides connectives into seven categories(listing,causal,conditional,appositive,contrastive,transitional and summative connectives)and error types into three categories(misuse,overuse and underuse of connectives).Through the analysis of the joint examination compositions of 105 students from two classes of Grade 3 in Ruijin No.1 Middle School,quantitative and qualitative researches are carried out with the help of corpus tools and a questionnaire.Through Ant Conc software,this research retrieves the connectives in self-built corpus,aiming to figure out the use of connectives in Chinese senior high school students’ English compositions,and the Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator is employed to make a comparative analysis of the use of connectives between native corpus LOCNESS and the self-built corpus,with a view to finding out the characteristics of the use of connectives by Chinese EFL learners.The research questions are as follows:(1)How are connectives currently used in senior high school students’ English writing?(2)What are the similarities and differences on the use of connectives between native learners and Chinese EFL learners?(3)What problems do students have when using connectives?The survey shows that the frequency of connectives used by senior high school students in English writing is not high,and the types of connectives used basically cover seven categories,but the use of connectives is quite repetitive and monotonous,with the use of listing connectives being the highest,followed by causal connectives and conditional connectives,while the frequencies of the other four types of connectives take up only a small proportion.Moreover,students tend to use some simple connectives rather than some complicated ones,making the use of connectives uneven.In addition,Chinese EFL learners use connectives far less frequently than native language learners.Among the seven types of connectives,they use listing,contrastive and causal connective far less frequently than native learners,and they use appositive connectives slightly less than native learners in their writing.However,there is little difference in the frequency of the use of conditional,summative and transitional connectives.Finally,through text analysis,it can be found there are many errors when they use connectives in their writing,with the frequency on the misuse of connectives ranking first,followed by the overuse of connectives and the underuse of connectives.Through the questionnaire,the following reasons for these errors are found: students’ insufficient knowledge about connectives;negative transfer of mother tongue;teachers’ attitude towards connective teaching.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions on the teaching of connectives,hoping to help improve students’ awareness of using connectives and give enlightenment to the teaching of English writing.The suggestions for English teachers are as follows: pay attention to the systematic teaching of connectives;offer students some relevant exercises on connectives;adjust their writing feedback mode.