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Part of
Learner Corpora and Language Teaching
Edited by Sandra Götz and Joybrato Mukherjee
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 92] 2019
► pp. 75–100

Cohesion or coesione?

L1 Italian learners’ use of linking adjuncts in academic essays

| Georgia State University

This paper presents an analysis of the use of linking adjuncts in academic essays by L1 Italian learners as compared to native speakers of English using the revised Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA 2) method. Concordance analyses were performed for selected linking adjuncts in academic essays from the Italian subset of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Log-likelihood values were calculated to identify cases of significant overuse and underuse. Next, the phraseological context surrounding the linking adjuncts was examined qualitatively. Results reveal variation in the use of some linking adjuncts by L1 Italian speakers as compared to native English speakers and show evidence of cross-linguistic influence. Implications include proposed pedagogic materials aimed at facilitating Italian learners’ acquisition of these cohesive devices.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cohesion
    • 2.1Defining cohesion
    • 2.2Cohesion and L2 learning
    • 2.3Cohesion and cross-linguistic influence
    • 2.4Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis
    • 2.5The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Linking adjuncts
      • 3.1.1Organizational linking adjuncts
      • 3.1.2Target linking adjuncts
    • 3.2Corpora
      • 3.2.1Learner corpus
      • 3.2.2Reference corpus
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Organizational linking adjuncts
      • 4.1.1Ordering linking adjuncts
      • 4.1.2Summarizing and concluding linking adjuncts
    • 4.2Target linking adjuncts
      • 4.2.1Consequently
      • 4.2.2Eventually
      • 4.2.3Rewording linking adjuncts
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Organizational linking adjuncts
      • 5.1.1Ordering linking adjuncts
      • 5.1.2Summarizing and concluding linking adjuncts
    • 5.2Target linking adjuncts
      • 5.2.1Consequently
      • 5.2.2Eventually
      • 5.2.3Rewording linking adjuncts
    • 5.3Pedagogical implications
    • 5.4Limitations and directions for future research
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 6 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.92.05dar
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