Investigating the Misuse of Discourse Markers by Foreign Language Learners of English in Essay Writing

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of discourse markers by third year students of English in essay writing in the department of English language and literature at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia, Jijel. It aimed at finding out whether third year students use discourse markers appropriately or not and the commonly misused discourse markers in each type of essays. Moreover it attempted to identify the types of potential errors made by the participants. For the purpose of data collection, this study was based on the analysis of sixty essays written by third year students of English. The participants were asked to write three types of essay namely; classification, argumentative, and cause and effect essays. Twenty essays were chosen from each type to be analysed following Fraser`s (2006) taxonomy. The present study applied error analysis method to find out the types of discourse markers used by the participants and the potential errors. The findings of the study revealed that third year students of English use discourse markers inappropriately because of the overuse of discourse markers. This latter resulted in the misuse of them in terms of six patterns including; wrong relation, overuse, distraction, omission, non-equivalent exchange, and semantic incompletion