Learner Corpora in an EFL Context: An Analysis of College Low-Achievers’ Conjunction Applications

Cohesion plays a significant role in language learning; however, little attention has been paid to it in English education in Taiwan.English writing, for the majority of learners in Taiwan, indeed makes them nervous and anxious, especially for low-achievers, and then gradually, they write less and less.This current study therefore aims to investigate narrative compositions written by EFL college low-achievers.A corpus of 192 compositions was collected from two classes of college freshmen who were randomly selected out of 23 classes in one technological university.The participants were asked to fill out the background information questionnaire and English selfefficacy scale before they worked on writing compositions.In the second semester of 2014, they were required to write three pieces of narrative compositions with the words provided by the instructor.Not only quantitative analysis would indicate the cohesive conjunctions applied by the EFL college low-achievers, but also cohesive problems would be revealed through qualitative analysis.The findings showed that the participants only applied a limited range of conjunctions in their writing, and they were unaware of the significance of cohesion.