An Error Analysis of Coordinating Conjunction Misuse in Chinese ESL Learners’ Writings: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Coordinating conjunctions, which are more recurrently used words than the other words in English, are not as easily well-acquired by Chinese students as they are intuitively used by native speakers. Yet, insufficient attention has been drawn to the study of coordinating conjunctions, which often leads to great difficulties in the acquisition of coordinating conjunctions for Chinese English as a second language learners. The present thesis has selected the three coordinating conjunctions of higher frequency, and, but and or as the target words in the research to analyze the misuse of these words in Chinese ESL learners’ writings of English under the theory of Error Analysis.The thesis established two corpora: Learner Corpus with 21 theses of Chinese graduate students of English major, downloaded from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI); Control Corpus with 22 theses from Proquest-PQDT. All the dissertations were essay writings about linguistics and were randomly selected. It was shown that there existed a minor gap in the frequency usage of coordinating conjunctions and, but and or between Chinese students of English major and native English speakers. However, the usages of SIA (Sentence-initial And) and SIB (Sentence-initial But) were strongly different between Chinese ESL learners and native English speakers. The conclusions above could serve as pedagogical references for English teachers in China so that Chinese ESL learners could come close to native speakers in terms of the usages of the three coordinating conjunctions and, but and or.