Besides … on the other hand: Using a corpus approach to explore the influence of teaching materials on Chinese students’ use of linking adverbials

Abstract

Studies conducted on first and second language student writing in English have pointed to the latter group's high use of features such as informal language, pronouns, and linking adverbials, yet few studies have been conducted on assessed undergraduate writing produced within an English-speaking environment. This paper reports findings from a corpus study of Chinese and British students' writing in UK universities, confirming that a key area of difference is the Chinese students' higher use of particular linking adverbials (e.g., besides, on the other hand). We hypothesise that one reason for this higher usage is the influence of secondary school teaching materials in mainland China prior to UK university study and examine a set of model texts from the English paper in the Chinese university entrance test, selected as these texts comprise much of the teaching material in the final year of secondary education. We argue that Chinese students are "primed" (Hoey, 2005) to favour particular linking adverbials, to disregard issues of informality, and to prefer sentence-initial positioning. It is hoped that the reported findings will challenge English language teachers and textbook writers to consider the requirements of writing within the academy.Keywords: Chinese students; teaching materials; corpus linguistics; linking adverbials; intensive reading lesson; National Matriculation Test. 2 IntroductionStudents from China are increasingly choosing to study at undergraduate level in English-speaking countries; in the UK, Chinese people now comprise the "largest single overseas student group" with more than 90,000 Chinese students engaged in learning in the UK (the British Council, 2011). However, relatively few large-scale studies have been carried out on the assessed undergraduate writing of this group within English-speaking contexts; instead, the majority of large-scale studies of both Chinese 1 students' writing and non-native speaker (NNS 2 ) student writing in general have been corpus studies concentrating on data sets of unassessed, extremely short, argumentative essays collected mainly from non-UK universities. While these "learner corpus" studies have yielded useful insights into L2English students' writing, it is unclear how far the findings can be extended to longer pieces of assessed writing.A common assertion of learner corpus studies is that NNSs "overuse," "under- English-speaking context, and this paper aims to address this gap. The dataset for 1 While it is recognised that the term 'Chinese students' refers to a range of geographical locations, dialects and ethnic groups, the majority of students in the study are from the PRC. Moreover, the contextual data in the corpus used in this study (BAWE) details only the student's self-proclaimed L1 (for many Chinese students this is simply 'Chinese'), and does not request information on perceived ethnicity. The group termed 'L1 English' or 'British' students gave English as their L1 and undertook all or most of their secondary education in the UK. 2 In this pap...

Arab EFL Learners’ Identification of English Sentence Patterns

“…In Pattern 2 (N1 Be Av), the presence of an adverb made it difficult for participants to identify the pattern, although Arabic language has different types of adverbs just like in English. This finding corresponds to studies showing that EFL learners have difficulty mastering English adverbs, although they are present in their mother tongue (Leedham & Cai, 2013;Lei, 2006;Narita & Sugiura, 2006).…”

A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of the Logical Connector ‘Thus’ in the Academic Writing of Turkish EFL Learners

“…The results obtained from this current study are consistent with the previous researches that have demonstrated that the use of adverbial connectors seems to become problematic for learners because many studies reported misuse, underuse or overuse of connectors analyzing corpus and constructed examples made by native and non-native learners of English in the literature (Babanoğlu, 2014;Heino, 2010;Leedham & Cai, 2013;Milton & Tsang, 1993;Narita, Sato, & Sugiura, 2004;Yeung, 2009). One of these studies was conducted by Narita, Sato and Sugiura (2004) in order to compare logical connectors in argumentative essays.…”

“…There have been some comparative studies in terms of the use of connectors in texts of native and non-native English speakers in order to analyze them syntactically and semantically, and the patterns of use, 'misuse', 'underuse' or 'overuse' of connectors analyzing corpus and constructed examples made by native and non-native learners of English (Babanoğlu, 2014;Bell, 2010;Carrió-Pastor, 2013;Casteele & Collewaert, 2013;Leedham & Cai, 2013;Milton & Tsang, 1993;Yeung, 2009). Most of these studies demonstrated that there has been a higher frequency of overuse of the certain discourse connectors in the academic prose of non-native learners of English compared to native English speakers (Babanoğlu, 2014;Leedham & Cai, 2013;Milton & Tsang, 1993;Yeung, 2009 Nevertheless, the classifications of well-known researchers and definitions of the connective cannot explain the semantic property and syntactic positioning of the logical connector 'thus' or its register of use.…”

“…Most of these studies demonstrated that there has been a higher frequency of overuse of the certain discourse connectors in the academic prose of non-native learners of English compared to native English speakers (Babanoğlu, 2014;Leedham & Cai, 2013;Milton & Tsang, 1993;Yeung, 2009 Nevertheless, the classifications of well-known researchers and definitions of the connective cannot explain the semantic property and syntactic positioning of the logical connector 'thus' or its register of use. Therefore, this current study makes an attempt to answer the research questions below:…”

“…Therefore, discourse connectives have been a field of big concern, especially in the advanced level of language learning (Yeung, 2009, p. 331). Several studies have already been conducted on the corpus studies of individual connectives in order to reveal their various functions and meanings as counting the frequencies in non-native writing as compared with those in native speakers' writing (Babanoğlu, 2014;Bell, 2010;Carrió-Pastor, 2013;Casteele & Collewaert, 2013;Leedham & Cai, 2013;Milton & Tsang, 1993;Yeung, 2009). …”