This study examined the use of conjunctions in Korean high school EFL learners’ writings in two discourse modes–description and argument. A corpus of seventy-six descriptive essays and eighty argumentative essays was developed, in which the essays were rated based on their cohesiveness and divided into three groups by their grades. Conjunctions were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) framework: additive, adversative, causal, and temporal conjunctions. The results revealed different trends of using conjunctions in the two different discourse modes. The descriptive writings with high scores on cohesion tend to exhibit more conjunctions when compared to lower-quality writings, and the argumentative writings with high scores showed fewer conjunctions. The high-quality writings in descriptive mode showed highly frequent uses of additives and adversatives, while those in argumentative mode displayed a lower frequency of additives and a more frequent use of adversative however. Small numbers of causal and temporal conjunctions were used in both discourse modes, and they were particularly limited in descriptive writings regardless of the cohesiveness of writings. This implies that more explicit instructions on causal and temporal conjunctions for each mode are needed in the writing classes. In addition, the scores on cohesion were significantly lower for the descriptive essays than for the argumentative essays, and a much narrower range of conjunctions was employed in descriptive writing. These results suggest a more balanced focus on various discourse modes of writing and the introduction of conjunctions that are appropriate for each mode, since the ability to use conjunctions in one mode does not seem to be automatically transferred to another mode in high school EFL learners’ writings.

This study aims to analyze the aspect of coherence realization of narrative discourse of female marriage immigrants. Considering that discourse structure and cohesive devices are engaged in the coherence of discourse, this study attempts to examine the aspect of structure development of narrative discourse and the utilization of reference and conjunction. The participants in the study are intermediate and advanced-level female marriage immigrants. The analysis results of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) the female marriage immigrants selectively contained [abstract] and [evaluation] while essentially containing [setting], [complicating action], [resolution] when comprising narratives; the coherence of discourse was found to be disrupted due to insertion of extraneous contents, lack of information, excess of information, or delaying of the introduction utterances; (2) the use of cohesive devices was concentrated in a particular expression. Suggestions based on the findings of the study are provided.

The purpose of this study is to examine cohesive devices in English writing textbooks and Korean college students’ writings through text and corpus analyses. An analysis of three writing textbooks used in one college English program in Seoul showed that the textbooks did not cover a full range of cohesive devices; instead, they focused on sentence transitions and conjunctions, which L2 writers often overuse or misuse. Other cohesive devices such as demonstratives and lexical cohesive devices such as synonyms, paraphrasing, or collocations, however, were rarely covered. To understand how Korean college students actually use cohesive devices in writing, this study also analyzed the frequencies of sentence transitions and demonstratives in learner and native speaker corpora. The results revealed L2 learners’ tendency to overuse sentence transitions and demonstrative pronouns compared to native speakers. However, the results also showed that as proficiency increases, learners tend to use fewer sentence transitions.