The use of linking adverbials in Chinese tertiary students’ IELTS argumentative essays and perceptions of students and teachers

Abstract

Linking adverbials (LAs, e.g., however) are important cohesive devices (Biber et al., 2021), but they are often found problematic in Chinese students’ argumentative writing (Appel, 2020; Milton & Tsang, 1993). Due to the high-stakes nature of the IELTS exam, it is valuable to explore the under-researched LA use in Chinese students’ IELTS argumentative writing and the perceptions of students and teachers. This corpus-based comparative study aims to address the gap by comparing 455 Chinese students’ IELTS essays with 226 proficient native students’ essays in the British Academic Written English corpus (Nesi et al., 2008), complemented by interviews with Chinese students and teachers. Findings show that Chinese tertiary students use LAs almost twice as frequently as proficient native students. 13 LAs are significantly overused by Chinese students, which reveals their over-reliance on sequential and additive LAs, e.g., first and also, and the unexpected preference for the multi-word LAs in IELTS writing, e.g., on the other hand. Only four adverbials are significantly underused, indicating a lack of input in the specific usages, e.g., the resultative then. Interviews reveal a general lack of instructions on alternative cohesive devices and underused items due to insufficient teaching hours and inadequate knowledge of certain usages among teachers. Two surprising motivations behind learners’ overuse of multi-word LAs are to deliberately demonstrate their linguistic sophistication in assessed IELTS writing and to make up the word count when they are writing on unfamiliar IELTS topics, which indicates the institutional effects of the IELTS exam on learners’ language production. This research shows the value of using a proficient native corpus to inform language use for L2 learners and the importance of going beyond the texts to explore the influence of institutional exams (e.g., IELTS) on learners’ writing practice.