فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

This paper studies conjunctions in dissertations written by professional master’s students at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sfax. Since conjunctions are important for linking parts of texts together and contributing to a clear writing style, SFL’s classification was adopted to analyse the dissertations and to compare them with the research articles they cited. The purpose of this comparison was twofold: first, to situate students’ writings with respect to professional authors in their fields, and second, to check if the students learnt the style of writing from these research articles. To achieve these purposes, ten master’s dissertations and ten research articles were gathered and manually annotated using UAM CorpusTool. A system network, based on Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), was built, distinguishing three types of meaning: elaboration, extension and enhancement. The findings revealed an overuse of conjunctions by master’s students, a focus on extension for adding ideas to previous ones and an inappropriate use of certain conjunctions. The study suggests teaching professional master’s students using authentic research articles to be able to identify the correct use of conjunctions in academic discourse.