英语专业学士与硕士毕业论文中连接词使用的对比研究

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摘 要

英语学术写作逐渐成为国内外交流的重要方式，能够熟练地用英语进行学术写作是大学生首要的必备能力，对英语专业的学生尤其重要。毕业论文，作为本科生和硕士生学术写作的重要组成部分，已经引起了外语教学写作的重视。英语学术论文不仅可以提高国内学生学术研究能力，更能促进国内外学者研究成果的交流，而语言的表达和衔接对学术思想传播有着极其重要的意义。在学术写作中，使用连接词是语篇衔接的重要手段，然而针对国内学生的调查研究发现，很多中国学生的语篇布局能力不足，在写作过程中不能适当运用连接词，导致文章逻辑跳跃性大，意思不容易贯通。即使基本功较扎实的学生，仍经常犯累赘与重复、残缺不全、含混不清等连贯衔接方面的错误。在英语写作中，作者恰当使用连接词，不仅可以连接句子和段落，还能够帮助读者更流畅地理解文章的内容。

本文基于Halliday amp; Hasan 的街接理论,以30篇东南大学英语专业本科毕业论文和30篇其他院校英语专业研究生毕业论文的引言部分作为研究对象，自建语料库实证研究，统计本科生论文和硕士生论文使用连接词的数量，频率等 。以研究的结果为基础，探索英语专业不同语言能力的学生论文写作中运用连接词的差异，通过对搜集的不同学习阶段的学术论文进行深入的对比分析，找出两组语料在连接词使用方面存在的差异，并探讨造成这些差异的原因。

最后，探索英语专业不同语言能力的学生写作中运用连接词的差异，以及造成差异的原因，分析连接词运用和论文语言流畅性的关系。从而提出连接词使用对论文衔接和连贯有重大作用，对写作教学也有重大意义，最后提出对英语专业论文学术写作的建议。

Acknowledgments I

Abstract II

摘 要 III

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background 1

1.2 Significance of the Study 1

1.3 Layout of the thesis 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

2.1 Conception of Conjunctions 4

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad 4

Chapter Three Research Methodology 6

3.1 Corpus Collection 6

3.2 Data Analysis 6

Chapter Four Research Findings and Discussions 8

4.1 The Differences of the Usage of Conjunctions of Academic Papers 8

4.2 The Reasons of the Differences 17

4.2.1 Limited knowledge about the variety of cohesive devices 17

4.2.2 The Overuse of certain types of connectors 18

4.3 Suggestions on the Writings of Academic Papers 18

4.4 Pedagogical implications 19

Chapter Five Conclusion 20

5.1 Summary 20

5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study 20

Reference 21

Appendix I Tables 22

Appendix II Figures 24

Chapter One Introduction

• 1. Background

Writing plays a significant role in daily communication for people of all occupations, which can be realized as an important tool to measure the language competence of different English learners.

It can examine one’s capability to handle a language and ability to deliver ideas, especially for postgraduate students and graduates. Coherence and clarity are significant and effective communication approaches including connectives such as besides, in addition(listing), for instance, for example(exemplification), however, yet, but(contrast), therefore, so, hence, concequently(result). These connectors are very important bridge to connect phrases, sentences and tests. It is estimated that some instructors usually give some comments on graduate thesis or papers, such as “lack focuses”, “lack cohesion”, “logical mass” and “lack organization”.

Especially for English learners without proficient writing skills and knowledge communication, they may fail to use connectors accurately and properly in academic writings.

Moreover, there are enormous differences in the use of connectors between B.A. theses and M.A. theses written by English-major postgraduates and graduates. Compared with B.A. students, M.A. students tend to use more connectors than B.A. students and B.A. students lack the awareness of using connectors in a flexible position. Therefore, it is necessary for English learners to master the skills of applying cohesion and cohesive devices to their papers.

It is no doubt that teachers of writing in universities should teach students how to write effectively, how to use accurate words, how to connect sentences, phrases and tests. For us students, what should we do to improve our skills to convey our viewpoints accurately and effectively? Firstly, we should get to know some important grammatical devices such as reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunction and lexical cohesion like synonym, antonym, collocation, hyponymy and repetition, which can enhance the powerfulness of words and contribute to the coherence of the test. Secondly, students should be familiar with some multifaceted problems like poor topic continuity, lack of details and inadequacy of cohesion and know how to avoid making these mistakes.

1.2 Significance of the Study

English writing, an important tool to measure the English learning proficiency standards of English learners, is an indispensable course for English major students. Writing can reflect the width and depth of knowledge of English learners including the accuracy of vocabulary, the correction of grammar and the understanding of cohesion. Meanwhile, writing can help us to improve the ability of logical thinking and capability of analyzing problems. English academic writing has gradually become the important way of exchange between domestic and foreign. At present, key colleges and universities have opened many English writing courses, from basic English writing and grammar learning in the first and second year to advanced writing, practical writing and graduation thesis writing in the third and last year. But some of students always misuse conjunctions like “As a result” and “At a result of’ and ignore the importance of cohesive devices, which lead to some sentences ambiguous and vague.

Domestic and foreign scholars have made a close study of the conjunction words deeply. Some researchers explore the theory about the conjunction words from the perspective of macro, and others develop a study on the practical level. The ability to write an accurate academic thesis is an essential skill for college students, especially for English majors. Graduation thesis, as an important part of academic writing for undergraduate and graduate students, has drawn the attention of foreign language writing teaching. English academic paper can not only improve the ability of the academic research for domestic students, but also promote the exchange of domestic and foreign scholars' research results. Besides, the conjunction words between the sentences play a significant role. Even some advanced English learners always made some mistakes such as the use of some words repeatedly and cumbersome. In English writing, the author chooses the proper connection words, which not only can connect sentences and paragraphs closely, but also can help readers understand the content of the article easily. Hence, the English writing course is closely related to improve the comprehensive ability of English major students.

In this paper, the author made a comparative Analysis of the Conjunctions in the Academic Papers of BA and MA English Major Students through empirical study methods based on corpus. And then find the difference, and finally put forward suggestions for the teaching of academic paper writing.

1) Will there be significant differences of the application of cohesive devices in academic papers between BA and MA English major students? What are they?

2) What are the frequencies of the cohesive devices ?

3) What is the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and the quality of the graduation thesis?

1.3 Layout of the thesis

The thesis is divided into five chapters. It is organized as follows:

In chapter One, I will introduce the background, the significance of the study and the layout of the thesis.

In chapter Two, I will give brief introduction of the definition of conjunctions and the classifications of conjunctions. Then I will give some details of literature review and theoretical framework, providing a general review of the previous related studies at home and abroad.

In chapter three, research methodology and data collection will be introduced . The questions are proposed, corpora used as data sources are described and data analysis will be introduced specifically.

Chapter Four is statically results and discussion, in which a comparative study of the different usage of conjunction words between the BA and MA. I will express the reasons of the differences in the use of connectives of BA and MA thesis. Finally, the relationship between the usage of connectives and the quality of writings will be illustrated.

Chapter Five draws a conclusion of the study, which comprises three parts: main findings of the study, limitations of the present study and suggestions of further studies.

Chapter Two Literature Review

This chapter consists of two sections. The first section clarifies the definitions and classifications of conjunctions. The second section offers the previous related studies at home and abroad.

2.1 Conception of Conjunctions

Conjunction is a typical type of semantic relation, which differs from other cohesive relations because people can comprehend the semantic relations between sentences by means of these conjunction elements. According to Halliday amp; Hasan(1976), “conjunction is a kind of semantic relation which functions as a specification of the way in which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before”

Conjunctive elements are cohesive not in themselves by virtue of their specific meanings, they are not primarily devices for our reading into the preceding test, but they express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other elements in the discourse.

(Halliday amp; Hasan, 1976:226)

They adopt a scheme of four categories to distinguish these different types of conjunctive elements, which consists of additive relation(e.g. and, or, furthermore, likewise), adversative relation (e.g. yet, though, but, however, anyhow), causal relation (e.g. so, therefore, hence, as a result, because, under the circumstances, otherwise) and temporal relation(e.g. first, next, after that, simultaneously, finally). According to Quirk et al.(1985) have divided conjunctions into seven major categories: listing(e.g. firstly, secondly, moreover, furthermore); summative(e.g. therefore, then, thus, in conclusion, to sum up); appositional(e.g. for instance, that is, in other words); resultive(e.g. consequently, hence);inferential(else, otherwise, in that case);contrastive(alternatively, on the contrary, in contrast, nevertheless) and transitional(e.g. meanwhile, incidently).

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad

This section firstly introduces the concepts of cohesion and cohesive devices, and then discusses the related previous research on cohesion in writing. Finally I will give a summary of the results of the previous research and propose the main purpose and importance of my research.

The concept of cohesion was firstly proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. In their book Cohesion in English, they argued that a test has texture, which made a text a unity with respect to its context, and distinguished the text from a disconnected sequence of sentences. In their eyes, cohesion refered to “the relations of meaning that exist within a test”. At the beginning, Halliday and Hasan (1976) focused on non-structural relations referring to cohesion, a semantic relation including grammatical and lexical cohesion. Then they proposed that the application of connectors in academic writing should “enable the speakers to organize what he was saying in such a way that it made sense in the context and fulfills its function as a message”( Halliday amp; Hasan, 2001). In Longman Grammar of Spoken and Writing English, Biber, Conrad and Edward(2000) proposed the significance of coordinator, subordinator, linking adverb and linking adverbials. The coordinator or coordinating conjunction was used to build coordinate structure. The main coordinators are “and”, “but”, and “or”. The second one is subordinator, or subordinating conjunction such as “because”, “as”, “while” are important. Some linking adverb such as “firstly”, ”therefore”, “though”.

A great number of Chinese scholars and students have done considerable researches on cohesive devices, but they focuses on different aspects of cohesive devices (e.g. causal connectors, linking words, transitional words). Pan amp; Feng(2004) compared the defferences of connectors usage patterns between Chinese postgraduates Writing Corpus and NC. Yang(2008) analyzed the errors of the use of cohesive devices in English writing. According to his viewpoints, some errors in logical connectors in English writing and illustrate the reasons of the appearance of errors. Xu( 2012) has done a corpus-based study of causal connectives in English major’s writing. She found that the use of causal connectives is much higher in intensity and lower in variety by Chinese English majors in comparison with native English speakers. Wu(2012) also did a corpus-based study of the logical connectors in Chinese EFL argumentative writing. He found that type overuse of logical connectors especially in the category of “addition” in Chinese EFL learners’ English essays is common. Xu(2014) conducted a corpus-based sturdy of adversative connectors in the dissertation of Chinese English graduates. She found that there are a lot of differences (density, variety, frequencies, position etc.) of adversative connectors’ usages between Chinese English graduates and native corpus. But few of scholars have studied the differences of the usages of connectors between M.A. theses and B.A. theses. Therefore, the corpus-based sturdy about the differences of connectors between these two different English proficiency level English learners are very meaningful.

Chapter Three Research Methodology

3.1 Corpus Collection

Before building corpus, we discuss the research purposes and some questions, for example, What kind of data should we collect? What kind of problem need to analyze? Finally, corpus based on English academic paper to find out the misuse and errors in academic paper writing by analyzing the mistakes on conjunctions appeared in thesis. And in order to improve students’ English writing ability, we would like to provide available corpus resources to analyze. Usually I collected college students’ compositions as the corpus resources. In this study, To meet the above requirements, the author selects the thesis written by four famous universities” students as the Corpus. The author collects 30 pieces of thesis from BA thesis of English majors in southeast university in successive three years from 2013 to 2015, and accordingly and collects30 pieces of thesis from MA thesis of English majors in another three universities in successive three years from 2013 to 2015, for both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

There are too much thesis written in different years. It is necessary to gather the newest thesis so as to make the result persuasive. The thesis in different fields may cause differences in the characteristics of conjunctions. In order to make the study efficient, a collection of thesis from linguistic thesis is necessary. Obviously, the quality of the thesis is very important which have a huge impact on the result.

3.2 Data Analysis

In the process of the study, the author adopted the qualitative and quantitative methods to complement each other. Two self-compiled corpora were established in the research. One corpus was consisted of 30M.A.theses by English major postgraduates from elite universities and the other made up of 30B.A.theses written by English major graduates from Southeast Universities.

The qualitative method is carried out to conclude and compare the features of model verbs between BA and MA thesis of English majors, while the quantitative method takes advantage of statistical analysis to make the research more scientific and accurate. The collection of the 60 pieces of thesis also helps to ensure the reliability of the research.

To be more specific, the analysis will be done from the perspective of frequency and variety of the conjunctions in MA and BA thesis.

The author will analyze which group uses the more complicated conjunctions and the mistakes they made. Then Figures concerning the frequency are drawn according to the statistical analysis, which lays the foundation for the comparison and contrast between BA and MA thesis of English majors. The author will study the reasons that may lead to the differences as well.

Through the empirical analysis, the author hopes that an authentic and systematic contrastive study of the BA and MA thesis of English majors will be achieved.

Chapter Four Research Findings and Discussions

4.1 The Differences of the Usage of Conjunctions of Academic Papers

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