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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Writing plays a very important role in daily communication, which acts as abridge for a person to convey affluent information to friends, relatives and workmates.And it is known as one of the four major skills any language learner needs to develop.In fact, it is supposed to be the most demanding language skill for English as ForeignLanguage learners (EFL learners for short) to acquire compared with the other threelanguage skills – listening, speaking and reading. English writing is an integrated taskwhich can reflect an EFL learner’s command of grammar, vocabulary as well asorganization and arrangement of related information.A phenomenon in English teaching is often observed that compositions ofadvanced even intermediate EFL learners can avoid most of syntax and lexical errorsvia carefully modifying the first drafts. However, problems still exist. For example,the author’s meaning is not expressed clearly or the organization of the composition islacking in coherence and cohesiveness.Although appropriate words and correct sentences are the foundation of goodwriting, they make little sense unless they are organized in a strictly coherent manner.Discourse connectors play an essential role in writing as cohesive ties. According toHalliday and Hason (1976), connectors are words or short phrases showing theinterrelation between two statements or clauses in a text by explicitly specifying aconceptual relationship between statements. A large number of Chinese EFL learnersare inclined to underuse, overuse or misuse discourse connectors, although it is widelyaccepted that a good command of discourse markers is of great importance in Englishwriting. Thus the thesis pays its attention to discourse connectors occurring inargumentative writing.
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1.2 Purpose of the Research
As indicated above, discourse connectors play an essential role in writing as cohesive devices. It is useful and significant to understand the command of discourseconnectors by Chinese EFL learners and find out the causes underlying theirinappropriate use of some connectors. A number of corpus-based studies referring todiscourse connectors have been conducted by some linguists both at home and abroad.Their research findings, yet, vary from each other. The research is necessary toexamine the preceding findings and unveil the features of connector use in Chinesesenior English majors.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Corpus Linguistics
Research relating to Corpus Linguistics has been done in many fields, such astext-to –speaking synthesis, content analysis, language learning and teaching, as wellas machine translation, since the first appearance in the 1960s. There is no doubt thatthe invention of computers gives a huge boost to Corpus Linguistics becauseresearchers and linguists are liberated from the drudgery of text-based analysis. It isobvious that computers play a crucial role in the development of Corpus Linguistics.However, this situation always leads to a misunderstanding that Corpus Linguistics isonly a mindless process of automatic language description. In fact, corpus-basedapproach can provide evidence of language structure and language use deriveddirectly from authentic texts in daily life with the cha本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。