THE L2 ACQUISITION OF THE COORDINATING CONJUNCTION "AND"

Abstract

Conjunctions are composed of two categories: subordinating conjunctions and
coordinating conjunctions. The function of conjunctions is to link ideas. Unlike
subordinating conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions have not received much attention
in second language acquisition, because it is generally believed that coordinating
conjunctions are easy to acquire due to simplistic notions of parallelism. Given the
overall frequency with which the word AND occurs in spoken and written English, it
should be assumed that its function is both pervasive and essential. Francis and Kucera
(1992:5) reported AND as the fourth most frequent word in the Brown Corpus of Written
English, after THE, BE, and OF, occurring 28,872 times in 1,014,000 words, or 28.5
times per 1000 words (Lazaraton;1992:10). The word AND is regarded as possessing few
semantic functions and even less interesting syntactic properties. Everybody recognizes
the word but is not aware of its importance. Lecturers often see that students omit or
misuse AND in writing. It is considered as a local problem for EFL learners since misuse
of the conjunction AND will not affect the communicative purpose. Nevertheless, this
flawed conjunction acquisition means that learners will not understand reading materials
without recognizing the whole sentence structure. Even more, the concept of “and” may
help the understanding of a sentence but in a sense, students do not really know what to
coordinate by means of “and.” Without the concept of coordination, the translation from
Indonesian to English will hamper acquisition and induce more errors.