Linking adverbials in first-year Korean university EFL learners' writing: a corpus-informed analysis

Abstract

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS sub-corpus. The distribution of the different semantic categories was nearly identical in the Korean writing and the American writing. The additive relation was most frequently used, followed by the causal, adversative, and sequential relations. However, the Korean learners' overall overuse of linking adverbials pervaded all the semantic categories. Their overuse was particularly noticeable in the sequential and additive categories. Accordingly, the analysis showed that overuse hypothesis is clearly supported in the present study. On the basis of the results of the study, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are presented.

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