Linking adverbials in first-year Korean university EFL learners' writing: a corpus-informed analysis

Abstract

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS sub-corpus. The distribution of the different semantic categories was nearly identical in the Korean writing and the American writing. The additive relation was most frequently used, followed by the causal, adversative, and sequential relations. However, the Korean learners' overall overuse of linking adverbials pervaded all the semantic categories. Their overuse was particularly noticeable in the sequential and additive categories. Accordingly, the analysis showed that overuse hypothesis is clearly supported in the present study. On the basis of the results of the study, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are presented.

A Cross-Cultural Comparative Investigation of Linking Adverbials in Linguistics Research Articles Written in English by Native and Arab Scholars

“…The result indicating the overuse of additive adverbials by NNESs is the reason the listing category was found to be overused by NNESs when compared to NESs ( Table 2). It is also consistent with other cross-cultural studies reporting the tendency of Asian writers of academic English to overuse these LAs (Ha, 2016;Ishikawa, 2010;Mudhhi & Hussein, 2014;Xu & Liu, 2012). This overuse of additive LAs by L1 Arabic scholars could be traced to the influence of classical Arabic (Mohamed-Sayidina, 2010;Mohamed & Omer, 2000;Ostler, 1987).…”

“…They, therefore, "contribute to the interactive nature of academic discourse" and "enable voices other than the author's to enter the text" (Povolná, 2016, p. 57). Previous studies have found cross-cultural variations showing that non-native English writers underuse contrastive LAs (Altenberg & Tapper, 1998;Granger & Tyson, 1996;Ha, 2016;Lei, 2012). Lei (2012) ascribes this to the complex semantic relationship between discourse units as they "mark incompatibility between information in different discourse units, or signal concessive relationships" (Biber, et al, 1999, p. 878).…”

The Use of Discourse Markers in Academic Writing by In-Service Primary School Teachers of English

“…Moreover, the acquisition of DMs should be concomitant with their use in the genre of academic writing in EFL contexts (Aijmer 2001, Das and Taboada 2018, Hyland 2004, Polat 2011. In this regard, literature in applied linguistics and EFL studies suggests that the genre-appropriate use of DMs by an EFL learner is associated with a number of challenges (Appel and Szeib 2018, Ha 2016, Tapper 2005, Werner 2017.…”

Corpus-based Exploration of Linking Adverbials of Result: Discovering What ELT Writing Coursebooks Lack

“…As seen in the findings of the present study, the target LAs were different in terms of patterns of use, and substituting one LA for another using the same pattern may lead to non-standard use (Park, 2013). Such a problem in LA teaching is also in line with Ha (2015), who remarked that "as many EFL teachers often provide their students with a semantically sorted long list of linking adverbials without detailed information on their individual usage. More importantly, they should be given advice on how to use the items in authentic context" (p. 12).…”

“…First, the word linking, as observed by Ha (2015), is clearer and more familiar to readers in general, as opposed to the word conjunct. The second reason lies in the fact that the word adverbial, compared with adverb, is more inclusive as the former can also refer to multi-word linking devices, such as on the other hand, in contrast, as a result, etc.…”