A Study on the Developmental Characteristics of Adverbial Conjuncts by Chinese Non-English Majors

Jiang Junmei*
*Faculty of International Studies, Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, China.
Periodicity:July - September'2015
DOI : https://doi.org/10.26634/jelt.5.3.3561

Abstract

Based on the Chinese Learner English Corpus, the present study seeks to investigate the developmental characteristics of the use of adverbial conjuncts. And the results show that at different learning stages Non-English majors use all kinds of adverbial conjuncts, but their occurrence frequencies are quite different, the enumerative adverbials are most frequently used, resultative and deductive adverbials come second, transitional adverbials are least used. Chinese learners, especially high school students rely heavily on a small number of adverbial conjuncts, and the use of adverbials lacks diversity. Secondly, the distribution of different semantic categories is roughly the same in the three corpora. In addition, as students learn English more, the use of adverbial conjuncts presents different developmental trends or characteristics, there is an increasing tendency of summative, appositive, contrastive and corroborative adverbials, but the use of resultative and transitional adverbials increases first and then decreases, and it is quite contrary to the use of enumerative adverbials. There is significant difference in the use of adverbial conjuncts between ST2 and ST3, but no significant difference between ST3 and St4

Keywords

Non- English Learners, Adverbial Conjuncts, Developmental Characteristics

How to Cite this Article?

Junmei, J. (2015. A Study on the Developmental Characteristics of Adverbial Conjuncts by Chinese Non-English Majors. i-manager’s Journal on English Language Teaching, 5(3), 19-27. https://doi.org/10.26634/jelt.5.3.3561

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