Use of Connectives in Writings by Korean Learners of English

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the use of connectives by learners of English as a foreign language and their length of study. Eighteen writing samples were collected, six from learners with 2 years of study of English and 12 from learners with 3 years of study. Results found that students ' length of study was related to the overall occurrence of the range of connectives produced, but it did not lead to a greater number of subordinators, which contribute to the syntactic complexity of a sentence. Furthermore, different connectives were shown to be associated more with certain types of errors than with others. The pedagogical implications of this study are twofold. First, the tendency to over-generalize the rules about using connectives and the excessive use of linking devices may hinder the natural flow of messages and lead to artificial and mechanical writing. Second, students should be taught about the grammatical constraints of individual connectives, because half of the incorrect uses of connectives resulted from not observing those constraints. Learners also need to become aware of the difference in register between spoken and written discourse; many of the errors in this study were caused by the transfer of the conventions of speech to writing. Students should therefore be exposed to more formal texts to help them understand the different conventions. (Contains 37 references.) (KFT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document