A Corpus Study on Linking Adverbials in Two Classroom Spoken Genres

Abstract

Linking adverbials as cohesive features tie the ideas to form dynamic and satisfactory text. This study intended to investigate the use of linking adverbials in two spoken genres; student presentations (Class other than a seminar in which one or more students speak in front of the class or lead the discussion) and discussion sections (Additional section of a lecture class designed for maximum student participation; maybe also called recitation). To this end, the study was based on the data collected from a corpus including 11 student presentations and nine discussion sections. The data were taken from MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) corpus and then analyzed based on Liu’s (2008) taxonomy of linking adverbials. The results indicated that in both genres additive and sequential classes of linking adverbials have received similar attention while the two genres were different in the proportion dedicated to the realizations of additive and causal/resultive classes of linking adverbials. The results pointed to differences concerning the use of subclasses adversative linking adverbials in both genres. The results of this study could have a contribution in teaching these important cohesive features in ESL classes aiming to improve students in relation to these two genres.

Keywords

• discussion sections
• linking adverbials
• spoken genres
• student presentations