A STUDY ON THE USE OF ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN BBC ONLINE NEWS

Abstract

In the language teaching, teaching grammar plays an important role in helping students master a language. It is widely believed that in a wide range of grammar aspects, adverbial clause is considered one of the indispensable elements, whose understanding therefore is of great importance to students. In an attempt to investigate the use of adverbial clauses in different English documents, this study aimed at analyzing how adverbial clauses are used in articles of BBC Online News. To conduct this research, fifty articles from BBC Online News were collected before being analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results revealed that adverbial clauses are used at a high frequency in the selected of BBC Online News articles. Specifically, the clauses of condition and concession are of the top three most frequent ones. Moreover, there were some differences in the frequency of occurrence of these types of adverbial clauses among articles of different themes. It is vital for learners to have a deep understanding to avoid obstacles in using adverbial clauses.