A Study on the Use of Connectives in ESL Students ’ Writing

The Corpus In order to conduct a quantitative study, a corpus consisted of 32 pieces of writing, with 62, 152 words, was collected from Year 1
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undergraduates from the City University of Hong Kong (Table I). Two similar size of corpuses of students’ writing were chosen from the BA in Teaching English as a Second Language (BATESL) and BSc. in Biology and Chemisrly (BScBCH). 14 pieces were selected from the BATESL students and 18 were from the BScBCH students. These students were taking an English proficiency module and the writing was one of their assignments submitted for assessment. There are two reasons for including essays from both Science and Arts students. First, it is hoped that the results of the analyses can generate a fair representation of students’ pattern of using connectives in general. Second, this study also attempts to find out whether there is any difference between Science and Arts students in using connectives. For the Arts students. the topic was not fixed by the Lecturer. Students were asked to write anything about “Education in Hong Kong”. Thus, a wide range of topics, like sex education, medium of teaching, and examination system were discussed. For the Science students, a list of topics was provided. From this they chose one topic. (See Appendix 2.) Table I. The Corpus:
argument as a whole ... becomes difficult to process and may even appear illogical” (Crewe 1990:3 16). Crewe also suggests that “over-use at best clutters up the text unnecessarily, and at worst, causes the thread of the argument to zigzag about, as each connective points it in a different direction” (324). Hartnett (1986) finds that poor writing can be improved when some connectives are taken out. With the absence of connectives, readers can usually supply the links from their expectations and predictions within the text. This kind of reconstruction, which builds upon reader’s thinking patterns, is neither reiiable nor consistent in terms of communication. The ability to interpret the intended relationships and supply the missing connectives depends upon individual reader’s knowledge and his or her experience of other similar kinds of argumentation. Misinterpretation or even communication breakdown may occur at any stage, especially when there are discrepancies between the writer and the reader’s way of thinking. Therefore, writings that are devoid of connectives can never be good writings. This paper sets out to investigate how students handle connectives in their writing. The first objective is to identify the most commonly used connectives. Secondly, the positioning of these connectives (initiai 1 non-initial) is analyzed. Next, certain cases of misuse are discussed to illustrate the possible causes of such problems in writing. Finally, some pedagogical implications for teaching writing are suggested. Methodology We used the list of conjunction documented in Quirk et al (I 989) as the base of different categories. After cross-checking with other lists on conjunctions (e.g. Halliday & Hasan 89, Byrne 1979). an additional sub-category “causal”, which is commonly noted in students’ writing in indicating casual relationship within and among sentences, was included under the Resultive category. Items like “so”, “since ” , “for” etc. were added to the subcategories so as to address as far as possible the usage of these connectives in students’ writing. (See Appendix 1 for the full categorisation.)
A Study
on the Use of Connectives Students’ Writing
in ESL
Introduction “The misuse of logical connectives is an almost universal feature of ESL students’ writing, though it may also occasionally happen with experienced writers” (Crewe I990:3 17). In Hong Kong, many ESL teachers and researchers would agree with this observation. Research has been carried out to identify the problems of misuse and overuse of logical connectives in ESL students’ writing (Crewe, Wright & Leung 1985, Falvey 1989, Crewe 1990. Hayward & Wilcoxon 1991, Field & Yip 1992). We are particularly interested in students’ writing at the tertiary levels. In our research, we noticed that the tertiary students, who have learned English for some 13 years, relied quite heavily on some logical connectives in writing, but very often these connectives are used too frequently and wrongly. Some teaching and learning strategies, therefore, need to be adopted to help students understand the correct way of using connectives in writing. Connectives are also called logical connectors (Leki 1989) logical devices (Byrne 1982) or conjunction (Halliday & Hasan 1976). For the sake of consistency, they are all referred as ‘connecmes’ in this paper. ConnectIves are one of the three rhetorical resources to produce a coherent written text (Byrne 1982). According to Byrne, connectives are ” words or phrases which Indicate meaning relationship between or within sentences” (p.18). If connectives are used appropriately, they will funcnon as text-organizers which allow sentence sequences to be understood as connected discourse rather than as autonomous sentences. As Halliday & Hasan noted, “With conjunction, we move into...a specificauon of the way in which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before” (1976:227). Connectives, however, do not create relationships. They only express the cohesive relationships that already exist in the writer’s thinking. They are indicators or visible signals of the relationships. When these devices are used judiciously by good writers, they can point readers to the direction of the argument as intended by the writer, and thus improve the communicability of the text. Some research findings suggest that in some cases, especially in poor writing, the presence of connectives may not necessarily improve the readability or coherence of a text. “If the links are misused, the 105