Nasim Ghanbari

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.