The use of discourse markers in the writings of turkish students of english as a foreign language: a corpus based study

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the discourse markers used by 104 elementary-level prep class students studying at Namık Kemal University in Turkey. Students were required to write a paragraph with 80-100 words as part of their mid-term exam in the academic year of 2013-2014. A small-size corpus was constructed by using these writings. The corpus was analyzed via a software program called as AntConc 3.2.4. in order to find out the types and frequency of discourse markers. It was revealed that 180 discourse markers were used by elementary-level students: ‘and’ was used 98 times, but occurred 51 times, ‘because’ was written 18 times and other discourse markers of ‘then’, ‘so’, ‘also’, ‘too’ and ‘still’ were used 7, 2, 2, 1, 1 times respectively. Furthermore, according to Fraser’s (1999) taxonomy of discourse markers, 180 discourse markers were grouped into four categories. It was found out that 101 markers were elaborative markers, 52 were contrastive markers, 18 were causative markers and 9 were inferential markers. Keywords: