Study on the Usage Patterns of Linking Adverbials in Chinese EFL Learn⁃ ers’Writings

This research is a corpus-based study on the usage patterns of linking adverbials(LA)by Chinese EFL learners at different proficiency levels,thus shedding light on problems facing students and analyzing underlying causes based on second language acquisition theories.Results show that Chinese high school students show a lack of richness in using LA,while Chinese undergraduates tend to overuse LA in an attempt to reach a superficial coherence.And in general,Chinese EFL learners have problems of overusing listing LA and underusing contrastive LA compared with their English native counterparts.