A Corpus Study of Chinese Speakers\' Uses of Additive Conjunctions in English Writing: Cases of besides, moreover, furthermore, and in addition
| Autor: | Hsu,Pei-Shan, 許珮珊 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 107 In the field of English as a foreign language (EFL) writing, vast majority of research has been in agreement that effective writing relies on coherence in relation to conjunction usage (Bolton, Nelson, & Hung, 2002). This study investigated the usage of the additive conjunctions besides, moreover, furthermore, and in addition by students at different proficiency levels, including L1 speakers and L2 writers in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan. One of the foci was the frequency of additive conjunction use in the essays. Further, we examined pragmatic usages concerning additive conjunctions occurring in written texts in order to find possible patterns. Our definitions of conjunctions and the categorization of pragmatic functions were based on the taxonomy of Quirk et al (1985) and Yeung (2009). The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) was employed as a database for our analysis, and we mainly selected Chinese L2 writers’ corpora and native speakers’ corpus (200 essays) as the database for the study. A total of 800, 200, and 400 essays were collected by writers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, respectively, in the corpus. The results showed that when comparing the frequency preference of additive conjunctions between L1 and L2 writers, the sequence of occurrences were extremely different from written texts. With regard to the writing proficiency levels of the writers, we found that higher proficiency level writers (i.e., B2) tended to use more additive conjunctions than lower proficiency level writers (i.e., A2). Additionally, we also inferred that the use of the four additive conjunctions in written contexts may not be easily or efficiently distinguished by different L2 proficiency level writers, in terms of similar levels of distribution, which is consistent with Neuner’s (1987) findings. Concerning the frequency of use of additive conjunctions by L2 writers from different regions, we found one thing in common to writers from all areas; that is, their most and least often used additive conjunctions were the same: besides was used the most and furthermore was used the least. On the other hand, both L1 and L2 writers tended to view these four additive conjunctions as operators of pragmatic force (PF) to reinforce preceding points in an argument, while the ratio of inappropriate usage in pragmatic shift (PS) by L2 writers was much higher than by L1 writers. This may easily lead to signaling unrelated topics to their current sentences or ideas by L2 writers, especially when applying besides. The use of moreover, furthermore and in addition was seen to be correctly used mostly in pragmatic force (PF) by five proficiency levels of writers (L1 and all proficiency levels of L2 writers). Furthermore, this finding can also be seen in terms of L1 and L2 writers from different regions; namely, pragmatic force (PF) is the predominant use for moreover, furthermore, and in addition by all of the writers involved; on the other hand, writers from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan were inclined to use pragmatic shift (PS) when they used besides in their essays. Several implications may be drawn for English curriculum design in the pedagogical domain. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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