A Study on the Use of Conjunctions by Korean English Learners

This paper presents how Korean EFL university students' argumentative essays differ from those of native English speakers in the use of conjunctions. It employed qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine the use of conjunctions in achieving textual cohesion of written discourse. The participants were 30 native English speakers and 61 Korean EFL university students, with 31 high proficiency level of students and 30 low proficiency level of students. The results revealed that the Korean students showed a tendency of overusing conjunctions to connect sentences overtly, compared to the NES. In the meaning based categorization of conjunctions, Korean EFL students used significantly more additive, causal, and temporal relations than the NES. Regarding syntactic categories, Korean students strongly preferred coordinating conjunctions and used significantly more of them than the NES who actually preferred conjunctive adverbials. As for sentential positions, whereas the NES preferred sentence-middle conjunctions, Korean students strongly preferred sentence-initial conjunctions. English proficiency level effect was found in the low proficiency students' preference of temporal conjunctions and the sentence-initial conjunctions. Implications and limitations are discussed.