Discourse markers in high school English textbooks in Iran

Abstract

Discourse Markers (DMs) are affective factors to connect sentences, hence making the text coherent. The purpose of this study was to investigate the reading comprehension sections of Iranian high school English textbooks (IHSETs) to find out the extent of using DMs and their types. To this end, the reading sections in IHSETs were analyzed to determine DMs. Fraser's (1999) category of DMs were used with 4 main classifications: a) Contrastive Markers, b) Elaborative Markers, c) Inferential Markers, and 4) Topic Change Markers. To make this investigation viable, parallel texts in internationally-developed English textbooks were compared with IHSETs in terms of the use of DMs. To insure the equality of the number of words and level of difficulty, the Flesch (1948) readability formula was used. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the frequency of DMs in the reading sections of IHETs and the authentic texts to the benefit of the authentic texts. Materials designers may find the results helpful in their work. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.