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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION GRADUATION PAPER THE USE OF CONNECTORS IN ENGLISH WRITING ASSIGNMENTS BY SOPHOMORES IN FELTE, ULIS, VNU Supervisor: Ms. Đoàn Thị Nương (M.A) Student: Trần Anh Tuấn Course: QH2012 HÀ NỘI - 2016 ĐẠI HỌC QUỐC GIA HÀ NỘI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ KHOA SƯ PHẠM TIẾNG ANH KHÓA LUẬN TỐT NGHIỆP Việc sử dụng từ nối trong bài viết tiếng Anh của sinh viên năm 2 khoa Sư phạm tiếng Anh, Đại học Ngoại Ngữ, ĐHQGHN Giáo viên hướng dẫn: Thạc sĩ Đoàn Thị Nương Sinh viên: Trần Anh Tuấn Khóa: QH2012 HÀ NỘI - 2016 ACCEPTANCE PAGE I hereby state that I: Trần Anh Tuấn (QH2012.F.1.E2), being a candidate for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (TEFL) accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Bachelor’s Graduation Paper deposited in the library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the origin of my paper deposited in the library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the librarian for the care, loan or reproduction of the paper. Signature Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, it is my pleasure to be supervised by Ms. Đoàn Thị Nương, to whom I would like to express my deepest gratitude. Without her allround supervision and careful guidance, this paper could not be completed. With no less sincerity, the researcher would like to thank all the participants who are second year students in FELTE, ULIS, VNU. Without their support and determination in the procedure of collecting data, the researcher could not finish this paper, either Last but not least, all my heart is dedicated to my family and friends, who have been providing me with special assistance and support so that I could complete this study. i ABSTRACT Cohesion has been widely accepted to be an indispensable part of a good essay. Conjunction, which is a type of cohesion, contributes a lot to the process of constructing connections between sentence and sentence in a paragraph and between paragraph and paragraph in an essay. In spite of the fact that research on cohesion and conjunctions was carried out early, it was not until 1990s that studies on connector usage in students’ essays was paid attention to. Because there have been only a few studies on this in Vietnam, the present study aimed at investigating the use of connectors in writing assignments written by second year students in FELTE, ULIS, VNU. 32 sophomores in FELTE, ULIS, VNU were chosen by purposive sampling to be research participants. Essays written by them were analyzed by both quantitative and qualitative method. To be more specific, frequency of connectors were recorded to see the most and least frequently used connectors in participants’ essays. Moreover, this paper also adopted the observation of document method to carefully diagnose some typical mistakes related to connector usage in these essays. The findings of this paper revealed that However is the most frequent connector, whereas Yet, Next and Under the circumstances are not used in the collected compositions. It also appeared that Vietnamese students are likely to overuse some connectors such as However, In conclusion, Because and For example. Moreover, mistakes in using connectors including omission, redundancy, wrong semantic function, spelling, position, punctuation and sentence structure were all found in these essays. These findings suggest that there is a need for changes in teaching method when it comes to connectors in order to avoid these mistakes in students’ essays. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT..........................................................................................i ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS.........................................................................................iii LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES AND ABBREVIATIONS.......................................vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION...............................................................................1 1. Statement of research question............................................................................1 2. Goals and objectives...........................................................................................2 3. Significance of the study.....................................................................................2 4. Scope of the study..............................................................................................3 5. Organization.......................................................................................................3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW....................................................................5 1. Concept of cohesion...........................................................................................5 2. Concept of connector..........................................................................................6 3. Distinction between conjunction and conjunct....................................................7 4. Classification of connectors................................................................................8 5. Early studies on EFL learners’ use of connectors..............................................9 6. Mistakes in using connectors............................................................................10 7. Chapter conclusion...........................................................................................12 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY............................................................................13 1. Setting of the study...........................................................................................13 2. Participants and subjects of the study................................................................14 3. Sampling..........................................................................................................14 iii 4. Procedure of data collection..............................................................................17 5. Data collection instrument................................................................................18 6. Procedure of data analysis.................................................................................18 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION........................................................20 1. Frequency of connectors in participants’ essays................................................20 1. 1. Most frequent connectors used in participants’ essays.............................21 1.2. Least frequent connectors used in participants’ essays..............................22 1.3. Comparison of most frequent connectors in Vietnamese students’ essays to that of students from other countries.................................................................23 1.4. Discussion on the significant differences in frequency of a pair of synonyms Although and Despite.......................................................................................24 2. Mistakes in the use of connectors in participants’ essays...................................25 2.1. Omission...................................................................................................26 2.2. Wrong semantic function...........................................................................28 2.3. Redundancy...............................................................................................30 2.4. Grammar - related connector......................................................................32 3. Implication.......................................................................................................34 4. Conclusion........................................................................................................36 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION.................................................................................37 1. Summary of findings........................................................................................37 2. Limitations.......................................................................................................38 3. Suggestions for further research........................................................................38 LIST OF REFERENCES.........................................................................................39 iv v LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES AND ABBREVIATIONS LIST OF FIGURE Figure 1 - Number of occurrences of chosen connectors in participants’ essays 21 Figure 2 - Occurrences of two wrong spelling connectors 32 LIST OF TABLE Table 1 - List of selected connectors in the present study adapted from Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) 9 Table 2 - Coding result 17 Table 3 - Rate of number of occurrences per 1000 words among the most frequent connectors in 4 different corpora 23 Table 4 - Occurrence of mistakes in connector usage 26 Table 5 - Illustration of discourse marker usage by Burns and Smallwood (as cited in Milton & Tsang, 1993) 35 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FELTE Faculty of English Language Teacher Education ULIS University of Languages and International Studies VNU Vietnam National University vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter aims at explaining the reasons for carrying out the present study. Furthermore, research questions, scope of the study and structure of the study would also be presented. 1. Statement of research question Apart from speaking, writing is also a means of communication between people and people. Thanks to writing, people can show their ability of brainstorming, organizing and conveying their thoughts (Nguyen & Le, 2012). It is quite obvious that not only the use of language, the validity of ideas but also the logical connection between parts of an essay contribute to the success of the essay. A piece of writing is not “a random set of utterances” but it needs to present a link between sentence and sentence, between paragraph and paragraph. This connection is defined as cohesion and coherence. Concerning this issue, in their famous book Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan (1976) divide text cohesion into 5 types: (1) Reference, (2) Substitution, (3) Ellipsis, (4) Conjunction, (5) Lexical cohesion. In the context of Vietnam, according to Nguyen and Le (2012), English majors face a struggle to write a coherent and cohesive essay with these five types of text cohesion. However, it appears that the fourth type is easy for students to utilize as they only need to add the connectors to their essays to show the link among clauses or sentences. Not only Vietnamese but also EFL learners in other countries are likely to overuse these devices. Therefore, in order to provide a closer look at Vietnamese EFL learners’ use of connectors, this research aims at answering two following research questions: 1, How often do students use connectors in their writings? 2, What are the problems in students’ use of connectors in writings? vii 2. Goals and objectives This research aims at investigating the use of connectors of second year students’ argumentative essays in FELTE, ULIS, VNU. To be more specific, the desirable result of this research is to explore the most commonly used connectors in students’ essays. Moreover, it is essential to identify what are the mistakes that students make in their essays. The research does not focus on grammatical mistakes of connectors use but the errors that result in semantic confusion among sentences of collected compositions. 3. Significance of the study As mentioned above, writing is a productive skill which requires students to generate their own language to convey their ideas effectively. Even when vocabulary and grammar structures are successfully employed, readers cannot figure out the logical link of an essay if the connection between ideas is loose. In other words, ideas themselves only stand alone but do not support each other to boost the persuasiveness of the essay. Since connectors play an important role to the link between different parts of an essay, misuse or overuse of connectors may cause a number of difficulties for readers to comprehend the logical connection of the essay. Regardless of this issue, there is a common assumption that EFL learners, even advanced ones tend to use much more connectors than native speakers (Granger & Tyson, 1996, Nguyen & Le, 2012). Therefore, the result of this study may provide a closer look at second year students’ use of connectors in their essays to examine whether the assumption is true or false. Moreover, it may help teachers; especially teachers in FELTE, ULIS, VNU draw out an appropriate approach to help improve the cohesion of their essays by appropriate use of connectors in the future. Although this study can only cover a small number of participants as well as tokens, it can also be a source of reference for further studies on connector usage in English essay writings in the context of Vietnam in the future. viii 4. Scope of the study Although connector usage can be noticed in spoken language and written language, the present study only concentrates on studying the use of connectors in written form, in other words, writing essays. The population of this research is relatively large with more than 400 second year students in total, therefore, involving all of them in this research is impractical. Essays written by a small number of participants are collected to build a corpus of more than 14,000 word tokens up. It is also impossible to analyze all connectors as the number of this kind of words is enormous. Therefore, there are only 20 connectors chosen to analyze in the present study. 5. Organization This research consists of five chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter aims at introducing the research problems, the significance of the study, the scope of the study and proposing the two research questions to answer in the study. Chapter 2: Literature review This chapter includes the definition of some key terms in the study such as coherence, connector and conjunction. Moreover, this chapter also contains the review of some earlier studies on connector usage and mistakes while using these connectors. Chapter 3: Methodology This chapter consists of the description of research participants, subjects and sampling method; data collection method and data analysis method. Chapter 4: Findings and discussion ix In this chapter, research findings are presented. Moreover, discussion about reasons for mistakes in using connectors is also included in this chapter. Chapter 5: Conclusion This chapter presents the summary of findings in the study, the limitations of the study as well as suggestions for research related to this issue in the future. x CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter was written in order to establish the theoretical background for the present study. Definition of some key terms in the study such as coherence, connector and conjunction would be discussed. Moreover, this chapter also contains the review of some earlier studies on connector usage and mistakes while using these connectors. 1. Concept of cohesion The study of cohesion in English language had been ignored for years until the most famous theory of cohesion was presented in the book Cohesion in English of Halliday and Hasan (1976). The two authors define cohesion as a semantic relation: “it refers to relations of meaning that exist within a text, and that define it as a text” (as cited in Ly, 2004). The authors categorize cohesion of texts into 5 types: (1) Reference: using the two linguistic elements to refer to the same objects or people. (2) Substitution: avoiding repeated linguistic elements by using substitution words or phrases (3) Ellipsis: dismissing linguistic elements that have the same meaning with previous words or phrases. (4) Conjunction: using conjunctions or conjunctive adverbials to indicate explicit relations among sentences (5) Lexical cohesion: using repetition or synonyms, antonyms in different parts of a text. As Shea (2009) states in his study, conjunction seems to stand out from the other four types of cohesion because it creates explicit relations between sentence and xi sentence, paragraph and paragraph rather than establishing connection among some single words or phrases. 2. Concept of connector Although all refer to the words or phrases that have the function to show the relationship of two different units of discourse, a number of terms are proposed in various theories to name conjunctive elements. In Halliday and Hasan’s taxonomy (1976), the two authors call these words and phrases as “conjunction” or “conjunctive cohesion”. Milton and Tsang (1993) state in their report that many other terms are used to indicate the similar meaning such as “connectives” (Crewe et al., 1985) and “logical connectors” (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999). Liu (2008) also reports the use of two more terms in other studies as “connective adjuncts” (Huddleson & Pullum, 2002) and “linking adjuncts” (Carter & McCarthy, 2006). Although these two reports refer to different terms from many available academic works, Liu (2008) and Milton and Tsang (1993) both agree that all of the aforementioned terms indicate the same language elements. As Liu (2008) discusses, all the terms that end with “connectives”, “connectors” and “adjuncts” cover the three types of linking devices including adverbials, coordinators and subordinators. However, there exists a mismatch in the discussion of the two reports. While it is considered as equivalent to Halliday and Hasan’s “conjunction” (Milton & Tsang, 1993), Liu (2008) points out that “conjuncts” only refers to adverbial linking devices with the exclusion of the other two types. To my point of view, Liu’s argument seems to be much more persuasive. Further clarification of the distinction of “conjunction” and “conjuncts” will be delivered in the following part. As these terms make no real distinction apart from different ways of wording, in the present study, “connectors”, “conjunctions” and “connectives” will be used interchangeably. Both of them will refer to all the words and phrases that note the relationship between units of discourse. xii 3. Distinction between conjunction and conjunct As suggested earlier, there is a clear distinction between “conjunction” and “conjunct”. Liu (2008) argues that “conjuncts” and “linking adverbials” are just different terms to indicate the same group of words which play a role as adverbials with the function of linking devices. If the two terms can be used interchangeably, the difference between “conjunction” and “conjunct” is clearly explained in the work of Biber et al. (1999). In their book, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Biber et al. (1999) note that linking adverbials can be represented by adverbs , prepositional phrases as well as prepositional clauses. Biber et al. (as cited in Liu, 2008) emphasize that linking adverbials can “make semantic connections between spans of discourse of varying length”. It means that conjuncts can illustrate the relationship between discourse of different levels such as clause, sentence and even paragraph. This feature completely differs from that of conjunction as conjunction’s effect is limited to clause level only. Moreover, the syntactic differences can also help to distinguish between “conjunction” and “conjunct”. The position of “conjunction” is fixed. In other words, “conjunction” can only appear at the beginning of a clause. For example: (1) If he comes, tell me. (2) Tell me if he comes. Although the position of the subordinator “if” is changed in the sentence, it is quite obvious to recognize that this change is caused by the conversion of the two clauses. As a matter of fact, the subordinator is still at the beginning of the clause “If he comes”. There is definitely no possible variation of the position of the word in this clause. On the other hand, the position of “conjunct” is quite variable. For instance: (1) In fact, she hasn’t graduated from her university xiii (2) She, in fact, hasn’t graduated from her university It appears that the position of the conjunct “in fact” is much more flexible. In example (1), it lies at the beginning of the clause (the sentence). Then, in example (2), it is in the middle of the clause (the sentence). Despite the change in position of the conjunct, there is hardly any difference in the meaning of the sentence. 4. Classification of connectors As there are many terms referring to “connector”, it is likely that there are various ways to categorize these connectors into groups. However, because of the distinction between “conjunct” and “conjunction” and the objectives of this study, I only consider the two models that are proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999). Halliday and Hasan (1976) classify connectors into 5 categories: additive, advertise, causal, temporal and continuatives. Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) change the classification into: additive, advertise, causal and sequential. Although the heading of the fourth category is changed, it appears that there are not any differences when compared to the previous framework. However, the problem is that Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) exclude the category of continuatives from their model. In my opinion, this adaptation is reasonable as these connectors, such as Now, Obviously and Surely do not represent any relationship between units of discourse, but in fact, mostly act as fillers. Moreover, this group of connectors is also undesirable in this research because these connectives are likely to appear in spoken language but not the written one which is the subject of this study. Therefore, in the present study, the researcher selects a list 20 connectives according to the model of Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) as the targets to collect data from students’ writing. xiv Types of connectors Discourse function Selected items Involve new information Moreover, Additive Furthermore, Besides, For example, For instance Involve information that Adversative is contrary Causal and logical inferences to However, Yet, On the other hand, Although, Despite expectations Involve both true causes Because, Because of, As a result, Consequently, Hence, Under the circumstances Concern either real - Sequential time relationships sequential or Firstly, Secondly, In relationships conclusion, Next in a text Table 1: List of selected connectors in the present study adapted from Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) 5. Early studies on EFL learners’ use of connectors With the development of computer and software technology, the examination of connector usage in particular and linguistic utterances in general becomes easier to conduct. Concerning research on connector usage of EFL learners, one of the most outstanding studies is the work of Granger and Tyson (1996). The subject of their study is French students’ argumentative essays. The students are at advanced level majoring in English who are considered to “make relatively few morphosyntactic errors but [...] a significant number of discourse level problems remain” (Granger & Tyson, 1996). Specifically, the two researchers examine a list of 108 connectors in students’ essays and conclude that there is no universal trend in the use of xv connectors but it is apparent that French learners tend to use more connectors that “add to, exemplify, or emphasize” than native speakers. On the other hand, the group of connectors which “change the direction of the argument or take the argument logically forward” is significantly underused. Narita, Sato and Sugiura (2004) investigate the use of connectors by Japanese English learners in their writings. The overall overuse is clearly stated in their paper, however, it is questionable that the difference in the frequency of all connectors is too small (14 tokens per 10000 words) to be taken into account (Shea, 2009). In addition, Narita et al. (2004) also come to a similar conclusion to Granger and Tyson, that EFL learners overuse some groups of connectors but underuse some others. Specifically, they reveal a fact that among Japanese, French, Swedish and Chinese learners, the connector “moreover” is always overused. Besides, students from three first groups have tendency to use “of course” and “for example/ for instance” more often than Chinese learners. In Vietnam, there are only a few available studies on this field. Among a few recent studies, Nguyen and Le (2012) from College of Foreign Languages, Hue University, conducted a research among Quang Binh University students. In this research, the authors pay little attention to whether students overuse or underuse connectors but mainly discuss the appropriate use of connectors to contribute to the cohesion and coherence of students’ essays. Yet, Nguyen and Le (2012) also note that Vietnamese students often misuse or overuse transitions such as “in addition”, “however”, “moreover” and so on. 6. Mistakes in using connectors Most of the earlier studies related to connector usage do not clearly figure out the mistakes made by students when using this kind of cohesive ties. In these studies, researchers only make claims about writers’ overuse or underuse connectors in comparison with English native speakers. Some other researchers may claim that xvi students often misuse English language connectors but they do not propose any types of misusage in their work. Rosa and Julieta (2014) are among a few researchers that clearly categorize these mistakes into different types. The first type of mistakes is “omission, scarcity and overuse of connectors” and the second one is “selection of wrong connector”. Although this way of categorizing the misuse of connectors can cover some important kinds of mistakes that affect the meaning of sentences and paragraphs, it leaves out a great number of mistakes related to grammatical rules. Herin - Becker (2013) proposes another way to sort out the mistakes related to connector usage in her thesis. To be more specific, she lists out 5 types of error including: redundancy, semantic function, implicitness, sentence structure and punctuation. This classification seems to be more persuasive than the previous one as it pays attention to both the suitability of the meaning of the connectors and the grammatical accuracy of the use of these types of language element. However, in my opinion, implicitness errors mainly result from students’ inability to express and build up a strong and persuasive argument instead of wrong connector selections as Herin - Becker (2013) defines. Therefore, in the present study, this type of error will be omitted from the analysis. With all these arguments, in the present study, mistakes in using connectors are classified into 2 main groups which are mainly similar to Herin-Becker’s study. However, the error of implicitness is omitted. To divide these connectors into categories, the researcher needs to answer a question whether or not these mistakes can affect the meaning of the sentence. If it does influence the meaning, the type of mistake will be put into the category of “Content - related mistakes”. On the other hand, it will be put into the category of “Grammar - related mistakes” if the usage of connector is not grammatically correct but still conveys the right semantic relationship between clauses and sentences. xvii
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