‘And so that was it’: Linking Adverbials in Student Academic Presentations

Abstract

Linking adverbials not only perform connecting functions between units of discourse but also facilitate the logical flow of a presentation and significantly affect the ways meaning is organized and conveyed by speakers and interpreted by listeners. The study examined comparatively L1 (n = 16) and L2 (n = 16) student presenters’ uses of linking adverbials in an attempt to uncover their range of forms, semantic types, frequency, and positions in L1 and L2 presentations. The analysis revealed that the two groups shared a great deal of commonalities in their choices of linking adverbials in terms of semantic types, forms, frequency, and position of these linking devices. It also identified a few specific cases of over-uses of certain types and forms in the L2 data that ESL presenters should be explicitly made aware of in their English language instruction.