A General Perspective on the Use of Conjunctions Across Arab Students as Turkish Language Learners

The present study aims to submit a general perspective to the conjunctions which Arab students whose language levels were B1 and B2 have structured in their written texts. To this end, this research was designed as a document analysis. In the study, the documents were obtained from free writings by 90 Arab students who were studying at Bolu Branch of TÖMER, Turkey. In order to analyse the conjunctions used by the study group in their written texts, frequency and percentage analyses were employed in quantitative findings obtained through this analysis. Additionally, Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare students’ use of conjunctions according to their language levels. The results of the study have indicated that the most commonly used conjunctions by Arab students whose language levels were B1 and B2 were additive, causal, adversative and time; on the contrary, the least commonly used conjunctions were coordinating, expository, exemplificatory and conditional. The general perspectives on the use of conjunctions across Arab students whose language levels were B2 were found to be higher in their written texts compared to those whose language levels were B1. Consequently, it was revealed that Arab students whose language levels were B2 used ‘adversative, conditional and exemplificatory conjunctions’ to a greater extent; contrary to this, it was found that they were not able to progress in the remaining five conjunctions. According to the findings of the study, teaching of the conjunctions used less commonly by Arab students should be focused more to enable them to comprehend what they read and to convey their ideas in written expression more proficiently