Use of connectives in written discourse: A study at an ELT department in Turkey

This dissertation aims to investigate the use of connectives in unplanned argumentative written discourse by Turkish ELT department students. The research questions of the study are: 1.Which discourse connectives do Turkish ELT department students use? 2. For what coherence relations do Turkish ELT department students use those connectives? 3. How appropriately do they use those connectives? 4. How correctly do they use those connectives? The participants of the study are 137 first year students taking Academic Writing and Report Writing course in the ELT B.A. program at Anadolu University, Education Faculty in Turkey. After excluding some students depending on their answers to the demographic questionnaire, the remaining 132 students have been chosen as the main participants of the research. The data for the study was collected in the spring semester of the 2007-2008 academic year. The participants were asked to write a well-developed argumentative essay. The connectives used by the participants were coded for each question both by the researcher and a native speaker as a second rater. Goldvarb X statistics program was used by the researcher for the statistical analysis. The study reveals that learners do not use a large variety of connectives in their essays. There are still some grammatical and punctuation errors, which may stem from L1 transfer or from the cognitive and syntactic complexity of the relation that the connective indicates. Misuses of some connectives were found whereas underuse and overuse of connectives are not so frequent. Learners use the unmarked meanings of the connectives more than their marked meanings, and they do not know how to substitute connectives. Learners are not aware of coordinate, subordinate and adverbial connective distinction, and they do not tend to use multiword connectives. For what relation they used the connectives was not understood in some cases. This may signal that learners may not be able to use other cohesive devices appropriately and correctly, and hence they cannot produce comprehensible and coherent texts even if they may think that they choose the appropriate connective.Key words: connectives, coherence, coherence relations