This study investigates the differences in the use of connecting adverbials, which are grouped into four functional categories, in timed and untimed student writing. Analyzing the frequency can reveal different usage patterns. The main source of data for analysis is the ChemCorpus, containing learner texts written by German native speakers collected at Chemnitz University of Technology, which is then compared to the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), which contains texts written by speakers with different first languages.