A compelling body of evidence suggests that EFL students have problem with logical connectors’ appropriate use in writing. This study explored Iranian EFL students’ adversative connectors use in their essay writing course. To this end, a Learner Corpus of 60393 words consisting of 156 essays was compiled. LOCNESS was chosen as the criterion corpus. AntConc, a freeware concordance program, was used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that, in general, learners underused adversative connectors; both native and non-native students used but the most; on the other hand, and while were overused and despite, yet, and instead were underused by the learners suggesting that the top five most overused adversative connectors make up around 72% of learners’ adversative connector use indicating that learners tend to use the same adversative connectors at the cost of underusing the other ones. Analysis of concordance line also illustrated that the learners tended to misuse the subordinating conjunction whereas and though in the initial position. It seems that learners need to be taught how to distinguish between different types of adversative connectors and how to use a wider variety of adversative connectors to reach a better coherence and cohesion in their writings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.