Chinese Conjunctions in Second Language Learners’ Written Texts

Abstract

In Chinese texts, cohesion refers to grammatical or lexical relationships within sentences and texts. Through these relationships, a series of sentences are connected to form unified texts that are intelligible and meaningful. Various studies have found that cohesion is a crucial factor in readability and reading comprehension, and thus have maintained that cohesion in a text influences comprehension [1]. Among the recent studies on Chinese readability [2–5], most have overlooked the function of discourse connectives for better reading comprehension. In this study, five Chinese conjunction types taken from a Chinese Written Corpus (CWC) were analyzed to determine their semantic features and structures and the reasons for learners’ usage errors. The results of this study will contribute to the development of teaching Chinese writing by using Chinese conjunctions to improve learners’ writing abilities.