Innovation in Language Learning

The aim of the present paper is to contribute to clarify the question of the relationship between frequency of use of conjunctions in EFL students´ compositions and writing quality. The current research was thus carried out to study conjunction and conjunction errors in argumentative essays written by third-year and fourth-year secondary education Spanish learners and to examine the correlation between their frequency of use and writing quality. Participants were 350 secondary education students enrolled in seven different Spanish state schools all of whom had started learning English at the age of five. Analysis of the compositions for cohesion was performed by counting conjunctions in accordance with the taxonomy of cohesive devices provided in Halliday and Hasan (1976), consisting of four categories of conjunctions, in terms of semantic function: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal. Results showed a positive significant relationship between conjunction density and writing quality. The qualitative analysis of the students´ compositions revealed that additive and casual conjunctions formed the largest occurrence of use, followed by adversative and temporal conjunctions. In addition, there was an extremely limited variety of conjunctions from each category in students’ writings. The majority of conjunctions were either underused or not used at all. Participants experienced difficulty in using conjunctions especially adversative and additive ones. Some pedagogical implications are drawn from the study.

Keywords: L2  writing, conjunctions, secondary education;