A Corpus Study of Linking Adverbials in EFL Learners’ Writing

Abstract

The current study focused on a corpus-based approach to examine the variation of linking adverbials used by B1, B2, and C1 level EFL Saudi learners. It investigated the frequency, position, and forms of linking adverbials across different EFL proficiency levels. Most previous work on linking adverbials in written essays has concentrated on the differences between native and non-native speakers in using the linking adverbials not on the development of linking adverbials among the proficiency levels.

The design and methods of this study were primarily quantitative and sought to identify the number of linking adverbials occurrences in the learner corpus. A qualitative approach was used to provide a more detailed analysis of the linking adverbials in the context, and to address the issue of the syntactic forms of the target linking adverbials by manual inspection of the concordance lines. EFCAMDAT (EF Cambridge Open Language Database) was sampled to include data from B1 level to C1 levels containing texts written by EFL Saudi Arabian students which are 7023 texts.

Mixed-effects models as a statistical test used to examine the difference between the frequency of the linking adverbials in general. The results show that there is no significant difference between the overall frequency of use of linking adverbials across the proficiency levels. However, fine-grained analysis of the linking adverbials illustrated that the low-level learners used spoken like linkers in their written texts. Conversely, the advanced learners demonstrated a preference for linking adverbials more frequently found in academic writing, as evidenced by comparisons with the COCA native English corpus. However, the data revealed that there was no significant relationship between the spoken style of linking adverbials and the proficiency of the learners. As learners increased their proficiency, their use of linking adverbials does not become written in style.

Furthermore, the findings related to the position of the linking adverbials revealed that there was a lack of variation across proficiency levels, indicating a stable pattern in their usage. This consistency suggests that learners across different proficiency levels apply similar approaches to placing linking adverbials in their writing. The results also indicated that Saudi EFL learners with different proficiency levels showed different preferences for the grammatical forms of linking adverbials used in their written texts. These differences appeared in single adverb, prepositional phrase and adverb phrase categories. Overall, these insights have valuable implications for creating instructional materials aimed at teaching linking adverbials in writing.