Linking Adverbials in the Writings of Kurdish Private School Students in Comparison to Native Speakers

Abstract

This study is extracted from an MA thesis entitled "Linking Adverbials in the Writing of Private School Students in Erbil City". It investigates how private school students in Erbil city use linking adverbials in their essays compared to native speakers. The study consists of two corpora, a native corpus and a learner corpus. The learner corpus comprises 80 essays written by 11 th -year students from four private schools in Erbil city and the native corpus is comprised of 20 essays written by American native speakers extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) (2009). The study specifically attempts to discover which linking adverbial categories and which individual linking adverbials are overused or underused, and in which positions in the sentence. The results showed that private school students explicitly overused enumeration/addition, and summation categories while underused contrast/concession categories. For individual linking adverbials, the results indicated that learners overused some linking adverbials, such as in conclusion, also, first(ly), second(ly), etc. In contrast, they underused rather, still, though, that is, etc. the results also demonstrated that learners preferred to place linking adverbials in the initial position.