EFL Students’ Problems in Using Linking Adverbials in Academic Writing

Abstract

Linking adverbials play a fundamental and effective role in the academic writing. They are considered as one of the most important lexical items for creating textual cohesion and ameliorating students’ writing quality. However, many students encounter serious problems in using them adequately. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the main problems that EFL students at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia face while using linking adverbials in academic writing. In order to achieve this aim, a contextual analysis is carried out on a corpus comprised of 20 essays that are written by first year Master students. After gathering the data, the linking adverbials that are used in the corpus were classified according to Huddleston & Pullum (2002) taxonomy. Then, the frequencies of the various types of linking adverbials were recorded and analyzed. The findings reveal that first year Master students of English overuse some connectors and ignore the others. Consequently, the way of using linking adverbials by EFL students reflects their limited vocabulary and their lack of linguistic competence.