A Corpus-based Analysis of Chinese EFL Learners’ Use of Linking Adverbials

This study investigated how the learners of English as a foreign language make use of linking adverbials (LAs) in academic writing, specifically concerned with the developmental aspects of Chinese college students’ ability to utilize them in argumentative essays. A corpus-based analysis was conducted with a learner corpus composed of four sub-corpora with respect to each year in college and a control corpus of English L1 writers’ essays. The results show that Chinese students use LAs excessively as compared to L1 writers. They overuse causal and sequential LAs across all years of study while gradually approaching the target norms in use of additive and adversative LAs. The frequencies of overused LAs fluctuate over time and then eventually decrease in the fourth year. They produce more various LAs as the amount of exposure and learning experience increases. However, they still tend to rely on a small number of LAs and overuse them in prefabricated patterns.