Conjunctive Relations in Argumentative Essays : Second language learners of English and the frequency of connective words

Abstract: This essay aims to examine texts written by students in upper secondary school year 10 to see which conjunctions and linking words students at that level use, the normalized frequency as well as how they are used. For the investigation, a corpus, the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC), was searched using AntConc, a corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis. The investigated and compared groups are vocational and academic students, girls and boys, all studying the English 5 course, and no one speaking English as their native language. The hypotheses were that academic students, due to higher motivation, would use a higher normalized frequency of internal conjunctive relations which create text cohesion compared to the vocational students, and also that girls would use a higher normalized frequency of the same type of conjunctive relations than boys due to better results in general. The results were as predicted that the students enrolled in the academic programs do use a higher frequency of conjunctive relations of the internal kind than students in the vocational programs, apart from the temporal category, and that the girls use a higher frequency of conjunctive relations of the internal kind, than the boys within all functions except the temporal.