Nasim Ghanbari

The present study aimed to find the most frequently used linking adverbials (LAs) in published papers by Iranian EFL writers and English native ones. Additionally, it intended to discover the difference between the frequency of LAs in the mentioned papers. Furthermore, it intended to examine the position of LAs in English sentences produced by Iranian students and English native speakers in written texts. To this end, among the papers published in the last 10 years, 60 English papers written by Iranian authors and 124 papers written by English native authors were selected based on a convenience sampling method. The discussion and conclusion parts of these papers were used as the corpus of the present study because these two sections of the published papers are written by the authors while other parts are the reviews of the previously done research. To draw the target data, AntConc software was used. Liu’s (2008) category for linking adverbials consisting of 110 LAs was used as the framework of the study. The study used raw frequency and also conducted Log likelihood and chi-square tests to analyze the collected data. The results showed that for both corpora, additive LAs were the most frequently used adverbs, and sequential ones were the least frequently used ones. Adversative and causal adverbs were in the second and third ranks respectively. Moreover, it was found that Iranian authors overused LAs compared to native authors. Finally, the results indicated that there was a significant difference between the positions of LAs between Iranian English papers and English native ones. Iranian writers used LAs in initial and medial positions more than native writers. Pedagogical implications of the study would be discussed.