The Use of Adverbial Conjuncts of Chinese EFL Learners and Native Speakers–Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This paper presents the difference about the use of adverbial conjuncts between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. The learners’ corpus CLEC and the native speakers’ corpus LOB have been used. Statistics and Chi-square test value demonstrate that Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse, underuse, and inappropriately use conjuncts compared with native speakers. They prefer to use a rather small set of conjuncts, such as listing conjuncts. Besides, Chinese EFL learners have a tendency to place the conjuncts in initial position, while native speakers prefer the medial position. The way that Chinese EFL learners emphasize on structure rather than content may cause the overuse of conjuncts, and limited exposure to those conjuncts may lead to the singleness of their positions.