Cohesive Conjunctions and and so as Discourse Strategies in English Native and Non-Native Engineering Lecturers: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Cohesive conjunction is widely considered as the most important discourse strategy of logical
connector in communication, especially in a classroom lecture. This study aims to investigate the use
of cohesive conjunction used by English native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker
(NNS)engineering lecturers through a corpus-based study. The study examines comparatively NS
(n=3) and NNS (n=3) engineering lecturers’ uses of cohesive conjunctions to uncover their
difference, frequency, and function. A total of 63680 word token obtained from MICASE and
Cosmolearning corpora was analyzed in this study. The top-two logical connectors that indicated the
most frequently used cohesive conjunction was carried out using ‘AncConc’ concordance software.
Frameworks of Halliday & Hasan (1976); Halliday (1994); Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) and
Eggins (1994) were used in this study. The findings show that no difference in the use of cohesive
conjunction between the two groups, and most connectors were logically used. The findings
suggested that English NS and NNS engineering lecturers by carefully selecting and adjusting the
information used cohesive conjunction ‘so’ and ‘and’ strategically as a cohesive device. Both NS
and NNS engineering lecturers used cohesive conjunction ‘and’ as additive relation (cohesive) and
structural relation (coordinate), while conjunction ‘so’ was used as implying some kinds of
reasoning or argument from premise and conversation initiation device. Besides, pedagogic
implications are also presented.