THE IMPACT OF COORDINATING CONJUNCTION USE ON THE SENTENCE DEVELOPMENT OF THAI AND KHMER UNIVERSITY STUDENT WRITERS

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Michael Thomas Gentner

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          The intent of this paper is to provide a contrastive analysis of Thai and Cambodian university students’ use of coordinating conjunctions in English narrative writing essays. The narrative writings of 175 students at a university in Bangkok, Thailand were examined and compared to 79 related essays written by students at a University in Battambang, Cambodia.  The data was used to explore the application of coordinating conjunctions as sentence extenders and propagators of constructs. The study found that although the Thai study subjects exhibited a higher distribution rate of coordinating conjunction types, the Cambodian study subjects employed coordinating conjunctions at nearly twice the frequency of Thai students resulting in a more than two-fold increase in sentence length and words per paper. The sentence length for the Cambodian subjects was within the recognized standard sentence length (15-20 words) for English academic writing while the average sentence length for the Thai subjects was nearly six words below average.

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