A contrastive analysis of Chinese and English conjunctives and its implications on teaching advanced English writing class

The main purpose of this thesis is conduct a contrastive analysis on Chinese and English conjunctives regarding their syntactic behavior in texts. The attention is directed to the inter.sentence aspects of the conjunctives(i.e. the textual level) in the two language systems. Halliday and Hasan’s(1976) theory of conjunctives is adopted as the basis for the contrastive analysis. By conducting the contrastive study, the present author hopes that valuable implications can be generated and be applied to the teaching of English writing to Chinese advanced ESL learners in Taiwan.Besides making a contrastive analysis, the author also provides some predictions and performance scales regarding Chinese ESL learners’ linguistic performance in English comjunctives. The predictons and performance scales are further verified with a data corpus totaled 116 written texts, which were collected from 116 advanced ESL subjects regularly attending ESL programs in college. The verification procedure confirms most of the predictions and performance scales.The study reveals that Chinese advanced ESL learners do receive certain influence from their first language, regarding the use of conjunctives at the level beyond sentence. Consequently, the outcome is regarded as capable of rendering valuable implications for ESL(or EFL)teachers and learners as well as researcher