Linking Adverbials in Academic Writing on English Linguistics by Korean MA Students

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of linking adverbials in the academic writing on English linguistics by Korean masters students. Linking adverbials have been investigated as important writing tools for EFL learners in academic and argumentative writing since they help to present clear and logical relationships among sentences. For the present study, a student corpus which consists of 10 masters theses in the discipline of English linguistics is compiled. I also compile a control corpus composed of 50 published articles from international journals to use as a standard. Masters students generally overuse the fewer types of linking adverbials compared to professional writers. Among 98 linking adverbials, 23 are overused while only 7 are underused by masters students. Also, they have a strong preference for the sentence-initial position of linking adverbials. Regarding the misuse, students are found to confuse on the other hand with in contrast or on the contrary. Some grammatical misuses such as form mismatch and run-on sentences are also easily identified. The results of this study indicate that Korean students in English linguistics are in the process of becoming professional writers; that is, even though they still have some similarities with Korean EFL undergraduates, they certainly attained a better control over linking ad-verbials compared to undergraduate students.