Discourse markers in EFL academic essays written by primary school teacher candidates
Discourse markers in EFL academic essays written by primary school teacher candidates

Summary/Abstract: This article reports a quantitative study of discourse markers identified in the corpus of academic essays written in the English language by a group of teacher candidates (further referred to as participants) enrolled in an undergraduate teacher education program for primary schools at Stockholm University (Sweden). The corpus for this study consisted of the mid-course and final course academic essays written by the participants in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The aim of the study was to identify and juxtapose discourse markers in the participants’ mid-course and the final course academic essays. It is assumed in the present study that the juxtaposition of the participants’ mid-course and the final course academic essays would yield data that would indicate possible changes in the use of discourse markers by participants over time, as well as reveal the frequently used discourse markers employed by the participants in their EFL academic essay writing. Following this assumption, the corpus of the participants’ EFL essays was analyzed with the help of the WordSmith software (Scott, 2012). The results of the quantitative computer-assisted analysis indicate that such discourse markers as accordingly, because, however, if, in order to, therefore, and usually were equally distributed in the participants’ mid-course and final course essays. The following discourse markers were present only in the corpus of the final course essays and were not identified in the mid-course essays: also, basically, concerning, first, firstly, generally, hence, hopefully, indeed, initially, in particular, it follows, just, later, next, otherwise, such, thereafter, and thereby. The analysis revealed a number of discourse markers that were identified exclusively in the corpus of the mid-course essays, such as, for example, besides, despite, eventually, like, OK, regarding, regardless, and yet. These findings are further presented and discussed in the article.

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