Features of Connector Use in Chinese College English Students' Writing

Abstract

This chapter introduces a study which investigates the features of connector use in Chinese nonEnglish major college students’ writing based on a home-developed learner corpus (3,908,816 tokens). The research findings reveal that Chinese college students use more one-word connectors than multiword ones to express the meaning of enumeration and addition, and that connectors are usually placed in simple declarative sentence order with inverted sentence order or complex sentence patterns rarely used. With reference to the English Grammar Profile (EGP), the criterial features of grammatical use based on the CEFR, it can be found that students’ use of connectors spreads across levels, with most connectors clustered on lower levels. It is expected that the current empirical study can inform scale descriptors and criterial features of the Cohesion Competence of the China’s Standards of English Language Ability (CSE).

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