The Use of Linking Adverbials by Korean EFL College Students in English Writing

This study examines how 113 Korean EFL college students use linking adverbials and which semantic category they prefer in their English writing. Moreover, the factors affecting on their use will be searched for by examining their English proficiency and comparing Korean EFL students’ use of linking adverbials with that of other EFL learners of different L1. The data is analyzed based on proficiency levels and compared with the Korean system. The results of this study are as follows: Korean EFL learners prefer the resultive semantic category the most and use linking adverbials in the order of enumerative, additive, and contrastive categories. The main affecting factors are syntactic functions, their English proficiency, and L1 transfer. Differences and similarities between English natives and EFL learners also appear in the results. While English natives prefer the additive category, the Korean EFL students prefer the resultive category. Similarly, the other EFL learners show the preference of using linking adverbials, like Korean students. As in previous studies, this study found that EFL learners, including Korean EFL learners, overuse linking adverbials and so among them is ranked at the top of the list they prefer. Based on these results, this study discusses educational implications.