The current study explores the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in two corpora compiled by the author. The learner corpus consists of 23 final papers contributed by 10 MA TESOL students from Taiwan while the control corpus contains 10 journal articles from two prestige international TESOL journals. On the quantitative dimension, student writers were found to slightly overuse connectors when the analysis was based on word-level. Additionally, the qualitative analysis revealed that certain CAs (e.g. besides, therefore) were used inappropriately by some of the learners. The paper ends with several teaching suggestions on how to help student writers master the complex system of conjunctive adverbials in English.