The use linking adverbials in academic writing of Turkish EFL learners: A corpus-based classroom implementation on the priming of contrastive adverbials

While teaching English as a foreign language, finding or preparing authentic materials is a daunting task for teachers of English as preparing new materials for different objectives of the lesson or different needs of the students is not easy. However, recently a new methodology has become popular in language teaching which offers some solutions for authentic material, namely corpus-based language teaching. Using concordance lines in corpora, foreign language learners are exposed to authentic input and have a chance to interact with native speaker language. In this study, Turkish EFL learners' use of contrastive adverbials in their academic writing has been investigated and results have been compared to native speakers' use of adverbials. The results have shown that Turkish EFL learners overuse contrastive adverbials in their academic writing and mostly prefer to use them in sentence-initial position while the extent of medial position preference of native speakers is very close to initial position preference. At the same time, in the present study, a corpus based implementation on contrastive adverbial use in academic writing has also been conducted to see whether there will be any improvement on participants' adverbial use or not. The results have shown that the participants' use of adverbials has improved considerably in terms of frequency. Nevertheless, their position preference has not improved when their use is compared to native speakers, as the participants have mostly preferred initial position ignoring medial and final position while native speakers have adverbials in both initial and medial position mostly. Lastly, participants' views about corpus-based implementation have also been investigated and they have stated that they find the implementation very effective as they have learned new adverbials and revised already known ones. In addition, participants have added that examining native speakers' real life examples have given them chance to gain experience about effective choice of adverbials and positioning them appropriately. Key Words: Corpus-based language teaching, contrastive adverbials