Abstract: Coherence is an essential factor in assessing English learners’ writing ability, and using connectives is an important way to achieve coherence To understand how Chinese non-English graduates use common contrastive connectors in argumentative essays, a small corpus (the learner corpus) based on students’ writing assignments is built and Antconc is used to compare the use of common contrastive connectors in this learner corpus with that in an native-speaker corpus (the reference corpus: US argumentative essays, part of LOCNESS) The results indicate that although Chinese learners and native speakers show a similar preference for some types of connectors, the former tend to overuse most of the connectors, especially those acquired earlier in their English learning experience Occasional misuse of some contrastive connectors also exists, as is reflected in a detailed analysis of Chinese learners’ use of “on the other hand” The findings have some implications for the teaching of writing to Chinese learners of English

Key words: coherence, argumentative writing, contrastive connector, corpus