A Corpus-based Analysis of TESOL EFL Students’ Use of Logical Connectors in Spoken English

In the past several decades, the compilation of learner corpora and the application of corpus linguistics have been extensively employed to improve learners’ use of logical connectors. However, the use of logical connectors in EFL learners’ spoken discourse remains under-researched. To investigate this field, the researcher built an EFL TESOL student spoken English corpus consisting of 27 spoken English samples of 12,241 words in total. Then, this study adopts corpus-based contrastive analysis and computer-aided error analysis to compare the tokens and the frequencies of the logical connectors with those in the native spoken English corpus of MICASE. Finally, underuse, overuse, and misuse in the TESOL student corpus were exemplified and explained. Findings reveal that the TESOL students tended to use a smaller set of logical connectors but used them more frequently than the English native speakers. Additive coordinating conjunctions such as and, so, and but were the most overused logical connectors. Moreover, the underuse of if, when, so that, and though shows that adverbial clauses were less frequently employed in their spoken discourse. A detailed explanation and pedagogical implications are also listed to help learners understand how to contextualize logical connectors at both syntactic and discourse level.