Conjunctive Adverbials in Chinese ESL Postgraduates’ Expository Writing

Conjunctive adverbials perform important cohesive and connective functions in discourse. Logically linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into an essay might impose great challenge for ESL learners. This paper investigated the use of conjunctive adverbials in the expository writings of Chinese postgraduate students. Learner corpus of 365 pieces of writings was compiled for analysis. The findings indicated that the participants tended to use additive and sequential types of linking adverbials than adversative and causal types. The results also showed that the students relied more heavily on a limited set of conjunctive adverbials and were not aware of the writing registers