Abstract
This study is an endeavor to find how English native and nonnative EFL/ESL (English as foreign language/English as second language) writers use adversative conjunctions to connect ideas together so that texts have both coherence and cohesion. Regarding the problems nonnative writers of EFL face when composing a piece of writing, we attempted a qualitative study through compiling a stack of 200 articles written by the two groups. The research design concerned the content analysis of research articles and descriptive statistics showing the frequency of occurrences of modals in the data. The findings indicated that the number of proper and correction adversatives exceeded those of contrastive and dismissal; the statistically significant difference between two groups lay in the use of proper and correction adversative conjunction, whereas the two groups showed little or no difference in the usage of contrastive or dismissal adversatives. These findings can help material writers, EFL/ESL teachers, and learners to appreciate the significant roles adversative conjunctions play in writing.
Highlights
Background of the StudyWriting in a foreign or second language is always a challenge especially for nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English as foreign language (EFL). Reid (1992) stated that “one of the most serious problems faced by NNSs of English in U.S colleges and universities is the difficulty of writing adequate prose in English” (p. 79)
The results of descriptive statistics indicated that native speakers used more adversative conjunctions in research articles
Perhaps a nonnative writer of EFL finds it quite demanding to maintain the cohesion of the text as it requires expertise in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the target language
Summary
Background of the StudyWriting in a foreign or second language is always a challenge especially for NNSs of EFL. Reid (1992) stated that “one of the most serious problems faced by NNSs of English in U.S colleges and universities is the difficulty of writing adequate prose in English” (p. 79). One of the problems that learners of EFL encounter is to make a comprehensible text as unified whole through using connectives. When we talk about a unit of language consisting of more than one sentence, we deal with the concept of discourse analysis. The reason why we raise the concept of discourse is that the connectedness among the sentences within and among paragraphs lies in cohesion, coherence, and texture that are the essential features that maintain the unity of the text. Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton (2001) reiterated that all diversity of definitions for discourse can be summed up in three main categories: “anything beyond the sentence, language use, and a broader range of social practice that includes non-linguistic and nonspecific instances of language” A tie, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), is a single instantiation of cohesion which incorporates cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions, and lexical cohesion
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