A Contrastive Study of the Use of Causal Connectives by Chinese EFL Learners and English Native Speakers in Writing

Abstract

This study attempts to compare Chinese learners’ use of causal connectives and that of English native speakers by a corpus-based approach. It finds that the density of causal connectives used by Chinese learners is higher than that of English native speakers, but their variety is smaller. It also finds that Chinese learners prefer an inductive thought pattern, while English native speakers are accustomed to thinking deductively. Furthermore, it finds that Chinese learners tend to put adverbial causal connectives at the initial positions of sentences, while English native speakers are more likely to put these words at the medial positions of sentences. Finally, this study finds that Chinese learners’ use of causal connectives is more colloquial than that of English native speakers.