The Use of Cohesive Devices in News Language: Overuse, Underuse or Misuse?

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the ESP classroom. By qualitatively coding data from the Wellington Corpora of Spoken and Written New Zealand English and analyzing the results statistically, this study gives a detailed account of the usage patterns of the form, meaning and position of linking adverbials in news, which informs ESP English syllabus and teaching materials design. Suggestions for journalism teachers, as well as students and learners of English for general purposes in an EFL context, were made. An example of teaching materials design based on the corpus findings is also given.