Linking adverbials in children’s writing: Exploring variation across year groups, genres, and disciplines

Abstract Linking adverbials is a crucial element in successful academic writing that is particularly challenging for both first and second-language learners to master. Drawing on a corpus of writing by mainstream students in UK schools, the current article explores the under-researched issues of how these forms develop across levels of study in an Anglophone context and how their use and development vary across text genres and academic disciplines. We demonstrate that, excluding a small number of high-frequency pathbreaking items (such as and, but and so), linking adverbials are markedly more frequent in children’s non-literary than literary writing and that the former, but not the latter, shows an increase in use of linkers as children mature. Linkers are equally prevalent across academic disciplines. However, the specific linkers used are strongly dependent on both text genre and academic discipline, reflecting functional differences between these. The analysis further demonstrates how students move from using characteristically spoken-style linkers towards more written-style linkers as they progress through school.