Chapter published in:
Learner Corpora and Language Teaching
Edited by Sandra Götz and Joybrato Mukherjee
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 92] 2019
► pp. 75–99

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.

Published online: 06 May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.92.05dar
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