Discourse connectors in EFL setting:A comparative analysis of the written corpora of EFL learners and native speakers

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This comparative study investigates the use of discourse connectors (DCs) in argumentative essays of EFL Sudanese and American Native undergraduate students. It aims to determine the similarities and differences in use of DCs in terms of syntactic category, syntactic distribution and semantic function as well as detecting the problems the Sudanese undergraduate students experience in the use of DCs. The researcher collected 65 argumentative essays from University of Khartoum and Sudan University for Science and Technology.The native students’ essays were 43 and collected from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), corpus of University of Michigan, codes (ICLE-US-MICH-0001.1-45.1).The researcher followed a taxonomy adopted from Halliday and Hasan (1976), Biber et al (1999), and Ron Cowan (2008). 130 DCs were classified into eight semantic categories. Quantitative and qualitative methods are followed. The quantitative method shows that the overall frequency of DCs occurrence in non-native students’ writing (NNSW) is higher than that of native students’ writing (NSW). The non-native students (NNS) and native students (NS) use 45 and 50 individual DCs respectively. Only 29 individual DCs are shared by the two groups. In other words, NNS use 16 DCs independently and NS use 21DCs autonomously.The qualitative method displays the similarities and differences between NNS and NS in terms of syntactic category, syntactic distribution and semantic function. In terms of syntactic category both NNS and NS employ most of DCs as conjunctive adverbials, followed by coordinators and then subordinators. Regarding syntactic distribution, NNS use most of DCs sentence initially and paragraph initially. Also, they use them interclausally but less frequently. On the other hand, NS use DCs in different positions: inter-clausally, sentence initially and medially, paragraph initially and medially. Both NNS and NS use most of DCs in similar functions; however, NS provide more functions for some DCs. On the other hand, NNS use DCs in limited functions. The researcher classified Sudanese students’ errors into 9 categories. The result showed that misuse of DCs was the most frequent problem, followed by overuse of DCs.