Fatemeh Nemati

According to the communicative language learning, pragmatic competence leads to better comprehension of pragmatic meaning of utterances, especially in spoken discourse. Discourse markers (DMs) are considered to be useful key factors that help the speakers to organize their discourse, manipulate their speeches, make different segments of the discourse more related and coherent, and also express their thoughts, feelings and their intended meanings and purposes in a well-formed structure to be more effective. In this regard, the most important goal of this study was to investigate the use of DMs by Iranian EFL learners in their oral presentations and compare it with that of English native speakers. For this purpose, 120 male and female EFL learners in the age range of 18-28 attending IELTS preparation courses in Tehran were chosen. Their speeches during interviews were recorded and then transcribed for further analysis. This Iranian corpus was compared to OANC corpus (English spoken face-to-face corpus). Our analysis highlighted three specific results. The results illustrated that English native speakers significantly make more frequent use of DMs in their spoken discourse than Iranian EFL learners. However, in both corpora Ideational Structure surprisingly is the most frequent function of English DMs in their oral presentations. Another interesting point is that both EFL learners and natives tend to use DMs most frequently in the medial position in a sentence or a clause.