The use of linking adverbials in the argumentative essays of Thai EFL learners

Abstract

The current study explores the use of linking adverbials in a Thai EFL learner corpus by comparing it with a US student corpus and focusing on occurrences of linking adverbials in different writing quality. The results revealed that the Thai learner corpus and the US student corpus shared several similar features in usage patterns of semantic categories (i.e., result/reference and enumerate/addition and summation), syntactic forms (i.e., single adverbials), and most frequent words (e.g., so, however, therefore). In regards to writing quality, higher quality essays (i.e., Score 3)contained significantly more linking adverbials than weaker ones (i.e., Scores 1 and 2) (p <.05). In addition, in more effective essays, a higher number of and a wider range of linking adverbials, different semantic categories, and semantic functions were found.