Connectives in advanced Swedish EFL learners’ written English – preliminary results

The purpose of this study is to investigate how advanced Swedish EFL learners use connectives in argumentative essays in comparison to how American University students use them in their writing. The data were taken from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE): the Swedish sub-corpus and the control corpus of American university student essays. The aim is to examine the use of three types of connectives: (1) adverbial conjuncts (e.g. therefore, in particular); (2) certain style and content disjuncts (e.g. actually, indeed); and (3) some lexical discourse markers (e.g. result, compare). The function of these connectives was classified according to a model combining features from Quirk et al.’s (1985) and J.R. Martin’s (1992) systems of classification. In this paper, the model of classification and the quantitative analysis of the data are presented together with the results from a holistic grading of a smaller sample of the data.