Keywords
|
discourse markers, academic writing, non-academic writing, elaborative, inferential
|
Abstract
|
The present study investigated the type of discourse markers in academic and non-academic writing
of Iranian EFL learners. It tried to find out the most frequent types and tokens of discourse markers and to
determine a significant difference between discourse markers in academic and non-academic writing. The 60
participants of this study were selected from Safire Lian language institute. Thirty were chosen to write
academic writing and 30 to write non-academic writing. Fraser's taxonomy was used as the main taxonomy
but to fulfill the aims of the study, some other taxonomy was used such as Cowan (2008) and Schiffrine (1981).
The Chi-Square statistical test was used to analyze data in order to find out the differences in the use of
discourse markers between academic and non-academic writing. Different hierarchies of discourse markers
were observed in the present study. Elaborative and inferential were the most frequent types in academic
genre while in non-academic genre elaborative was only the most frequent type. Moreover, the quantitative
analysis showed that there was a significant difference in the use of discourse markers in academic and non-
academic writing. Furthermore, as the result revealed discourse markers were required more in academic
than non-academic writing.
|