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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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(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.
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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.
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