An investigation into correlation between discourse markers usage frequency and argumentative writing skills by students at Business English Department, National Economics University
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i hc Ngoi ng
Lu
; Mã s: 60 22 15
ng dn: Assoc. Prof. Dr. i Quang
o v: 2012
Abstract: This research seeks to understand the usage frequency of discourse markers in
proficiency level. The major concern of this research is to reveal the link between the
frequency of using discourse markers in argumentative essays and quality of writing
essays after counting the average percentage of discourse markers in each group of
ons for
educators and teachers on teaching academic writing and especially argumentative essays
discourse markers and how they can be used in creating a coherent text. The participants
are 38 second-year students, of Business and Foreign Languages, National Economics
University. Their essays were the primary data for the detailed linguistics analysis.
Keywords: Ting Anh; K t; Bài lun; Du hiu din ngôn; ng
dy
Content
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
Vietnamese government views English as a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and doing
business. Therefore, a command of English is emphasized, and English is a required subject in
public schools as well as private schools where grammar is unofficially main focus in the process
of teaching and studying. Vietnamese students, especially those whose major field is related to
English, however, face considerable challenges as they begin their tertiary studies. Therefore,
they need to familiarize themselves with the requirement and purposes for writing argument
genres from the training institution. They need to realize the significance of argumentative
writing skills and factor that contributes to the flow of argumentative essays content namely
discourse markers or transitional signals and develop control over language- discourse markers
to improve the express arguments persuasively and directly.
Within the past fifteen years or so, there has been an increasing interest in the theoretical status
of discourse markers in spoken language and written language. To date, there have been a few
studies undertaken to explore the discourse markers usage in writing in general. There has not
yet been a study done that investigated fully the correlation between discourse markers usage and
quality of argumentative writing essays. The current study is hereby designed to examine the
relationship between the frequency usage of discourse markers and argumentative writing skills
by students at Business English Department, National Economics University.
2. Scope of the study
The discourse marker is a vast topic in English teaching and learning in which various aspect and
functions of it have been under research. It would ambitious to cover so many aspects in this
study. Therefore, the area investigated of the study is the correlation between frequency usage of
discourse markers and argumentative writing kills and subjects of the study are 38 second-year
students at Business English Department, National Economics University.
3. Aims and objectives of the study
3.1. Aims of the study
vThe study aims at helping students recognize the significance of discourse markers in writing
argumentative essay and then applying them in their writing by providing them knowledge on
types of discourse markers, and functions of each type.
3.2. Objectives of the study
By helping students recognize the importance of discourse markers, the study will firstly (1)
examine the frequency of use of discourse markers in argumentative essays written by 38 second
year students at Business English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, National
Economics University. More specifically, it will seek the average percentage of discourse
markers and their types in argumentative essays. The study, then, (2) discloses the relationship
between the frequency of d
4. Research questions
In this study the answers to the following research questions were of particular interest:
1.
essays?
2. How does the frequency of use of discourse markers correlate with the quality of written
essays?
To answer these questions, a study employing detailed linguistic analysis will be pursued. The
primary data comprises the analysis of argumentative essays written in Academic writing course
by 38 students at Business English Department, National Economics University.
5. Design of the study
The thesis is divided into three main parts including Introduction, Development and
Conclusion. In part A, readers will be informed of the real situation in teaching and
learning academic writing and the urgent need leading to the study being conducted.
Also, the writer will mention the aims and objectives of the study. In the second part,
Development, there are three chapters: Literature review supplies background
information of terms, and summary of previous researches; Methodology describes
carefully the participants, the research instruments and the research procedure; Findings
and Discussions reveals the results of the study and implications for the teaching of
argumentative essay writing. Conclusion is the final part wrapping up the thesis.
PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW
.
I.1. English study in Vietnam
I.1.1. English study in Vietnam and National Economics University
I.1.2. Issues in writing academic arguments
I.2. Studies related to the topic
I.3. Definition and background information of terms
I.3.1. Definition of academic writing and argumentative essay
I.3.2. Discourse markers
I.3.2.1. Definition of discourse markers
I.3.2.2. Properties of discourse markers
I.3.2.3 Types of discourse markers
I.3.2.4. Role of discourse markers in writing
CHAPTER TWO: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
1. Background of the site for data collection
The argumentative essays examined in this study arouse out of Writing semester 4 that students
at Business English Department have to complete. the Writing skill is taught in four semesters
from Writing 1 and 2 about Sentence writing to Writing 3 about Paragraph writing and Writing 4
about Essay. Writing 4 is designed for the students majored in English of the Faculty of Foreign
Languages, NEU, whose level of English is upper-intermediate and have completed one section
for Sentence Writing, and two sections for Paragraph Writing. The course provides students with
basic knowledge of essay organization, unity and coherence, ways to improve academic writing
style. In the next part of the course, students go through different kinds of essay: process
analysis, cause and effect, classification, reaction, comparison and contrast, discussion essays
and especially argumentative essays are the emphasis. With various practice tasks, writing in
each lesson comes in its natural process: gathering vocabulary and ideas for a topic,
brainstorming and outlining, writing, and editing. This course aims at equipping students with
fundamental understanding of the essay first, and then supplying them with practice tasks in
using
the right academic writing style, encourages them to edit their own writing, and acquaints them
with timed writing.
2. Data gathering technique
obtained.
At the start of 13-week course, the researcher attended writing sessions to observe nature of
writing training and practice. During the attendance, the course syllabus and the student
workbook and worksheet were obtained. Also, the researcher approached students in those
sessions to distribute Invitation letters (Appendix A), which informed them of the research
well. Willing students were asked to fill in the Student Information Sheet (Appendix B) for
demographic information about their education, language proficiency.
3. The participants
A sample of 38 participants include all second year students. They all started learning English in
fourth grade of primary school at the age of 10 and had been exposed to the same total number of
lessons of English. None of the participants had spent any considerable time in an English-
speaking country.
4. Instruments
The instrument used in the study was a writing test designed and validated by Cambridge
University. The test was taken from Cambridge Practice Test for IELTS 6. It consisted of 4 parts:
Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. In Writing part, there are two smaller tasks: task 1
and 2. In this study, the researcher only took one task: Writing task 2. Participants were delivered
the test with the topic, topic requirement and space for them to write their essays.
5. Procedure
Both sample groups were tested on the same day in order to avoid participants informing each
other about the task content. The testing was conducted in a usual classroom environment during
during the test. Care was taken that teachers were not aware of the final aim of the study. The
researcher did not want to reveal in advance her intention to focus on discourse markers prior to
or during the writing task. Also, she did not disclose in advance the topic participants were to
write on in order to avoid possible student temptation or teacher temptation to prepare for writing
about this particular topic.
The topic of the argumentative essay was Today, the high sales of popular consumer goods
reflect the power of advertising and not the real needs of the society in which they are sold. To
what extent do you agree or disagree?
The essays were reviewed by the researcher with regard to two aspects. First, the discourse
markers used in the essays were tallied for later analysis. In addition, the essays were scored with
respect to their quality. In order to ensure the reliability of scoring,
20% of the essays were scored by the researcher and an experienced university professor who
completed her MA course of TESOL at University of Queensland, Australia and then the inter-
-rater
reliability; the obtained reliability index was 0.75, which is an acceptable reliability index. Then
the rest of the essays were scored by the researcher, herself.
In order to answer the first question regarding the frequency of the use of discourse markers, the
frequency of the overall discourse markers used in each essay type were calculated. There an
analysis of discourse markers was conducted. This implied identifying and classifying all
discourse markers found in the corpus of compositions. In identifying discourse markers, the
Elaborative, Contrastive, Inferential and Temporal markers. Then the frequencies were turned
into percentages to have a clearer picture of the use of individual discourse markers used in each
essay type. Then, the discourse markers were classified with respect to the category of the
cohesive devices they belonged to. This time the mean scores of the use of discourse markers
belonging to different categories were calculated. This allowed the researchers to statistically
compare the use of different categories of discourse markers across different text types.
Finally, basing on the frequency of use of discourse markers and the percentage, the
researcher draw the conclusion about the correlation between the number of discourse markers
and quality of essay writing.
CHAPTER THREE: DATA ANALYSIS
This chapter will present the results of the study and the analysis of the data collected
III.1. Test Analysis
To answer research question 1, the researcher counted the number of discourse markers and the
total word count of each essay. Then, she could work out the frequency of use of English
discourse markers that students use when writing their argumentative essays. To investigate the
correlation between the frequency of use of discourse markers and quality of essays, the
researcher analyzed the essay to examine whether the large number of discourse markers used
could lead to the high quality or the high score or not.
III.1.1. Frequency of discourse markers
Table 3: Distribution of discourse markers in all essays
Group
Total number of
essays
Number of words
Number of
discourse markers
Ratio of discourse
markers per 100
1
10
3136
174
5.55
2
14
3816
221
5.79
3
14
3422
247
7.21
Mean
12.67
3458
214
6.18
Total
38
10374
642
18.55
Results showed that the subjects in this study employed a small number of discourse markers in
their essays. Among three groups, group 3 whose range of mark was from 0 to 5 was the ones
who employed more discourse markers than other two groups, 7.21 %. This proportion of group
3 was higher in comparison with group 1 whose mark ranged from 7 to 10. 5.55% was the figure
of group 1 and group 2 ranked the second with the ratio was 5.79%. In conclusion, the data
indicated that although group 1 including students with higher marks than group 2 and 3, they
used less number of discourse markers in their argumentative essays. And surprisingly, students
coming from 3 were those who applied most number of discourse markers and took up the
highest percentage compared to other two groups. Thus, the frequency of use of discourse
III.1.2. Frequency of type of discourse markers
The data analysis reveals that in the total number of 174 discourse markers used in 10
essays of students in group 1, half of them belonged to Elaborative markers such as and, also and
or. Contrastive markers ranked the second with the percentage of 23.12, half of the percentage of
Elaborative markers. Normally, students tended to use several discourse markers namely
however, although or on the other hand to show opposing ideas. The two last types of discourse
markers were Inferential markers and Temporal markers taking up the percent of 13.78 and
12.64 respectively.
After the students finished the two exams, I collected and analyzed errors they committed
in those papers. The errors then were identified and categorized and the most typical and
common errors were presented. In general, the students made errors both in using language and
organization.
The conclusion could be drawn from data analysis about frequency and percentage of
types of discourse markers in group 1 essays was that students used Elaborative markers most.
By calculating the ratio four main types of discourse markers used in group 2 essays, researchers
concluded that 50.78% of all discourse markers employed in essays fell into Elaborative
markers. This figure was more than two times the use of Contrastive markers and more than
three times and four times the use of Inferential and Temporal markers. The following extract
was taken from essay of Subject 2 to illustrate the frequency of use of four discourse markers
especially Elaborative markers. Among these 3 types, naturally Elaborative markers were
heavily used.
Taking a case of a fat man, he is lazy and overeat, but he wishes to lose weight without doing
exercises or cutting the meals when he watches a TV commercial of a losing-weight bell. A
model on that advertisement just need to wear the bell and relax, her weight will be reduced 2
kilos after a week. Therefore, the fat man purchase that product after watching an
advertisement.
In only three sentences, and was used 2 times, this student also used or which belong to
Elaborative markers. Three other types of discourse markers were used once for each type.
III.1.3. Correlation between the use of discourse markers and quality of argumentative writing
essays
It is crystal clear that there was no correlation between frequency of use of discourse markers
and quality of writing essays. In the first place, the number of discourse markers used in essays
accounted for small one, only 5.55% per 100 words in group 1 and 7.21% per 100 words in
group 3. Although group 1 were those who got higher marks than group 3, students in group 1
still employed smaller number of discourse markers in their writing. Therefore, discourse
markers were not a factor that influenced the quality of writing which was determined by the
integrated skills. The following example of subject 2 in group 2 will prove that.
CHAPTER FOUR: MAJOR FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS
IV.1. Synthesis of the findings and discussions
The study attempted to answer two research questions.
(1) What is the frequency of use of English discourse markers when students write
argumentative essays?
(2) How does the frequency of use of discourse markers correlate with quality of writing
essays?
by calculating the number of discourse markers used in essays and investigated the correlation
between the frequency of use of discourse markers and the quality of writing essays.
The results of the study showed that Elaborative markers were the most frequently used cohesive
devices in argumentative essays. The means for the use of these markers and the percentage of
them turned out to be much higher than those of the other discourse markers. These results are in
line with those of other studies showing that Elaborative markers are those frequently used
cohesive devices. This might imply that the use of Elaborative markers is more closely related to
argumentative compositions than other types of discourse markers. The most commonly used
Elaborative markers in text types were and, also, moreover and or, among which and was used
in a significantly higher quantity than other markers.
The extensive use of Elaborative markers may also be due to the fact that argumentative texts
entail expressing an opinion and trying to persuade the reader by providing reasons for argument
and, at the same time, presenting the opposing view and refuting it. It deals with the mental
process of judging. "Argumentations can be analyzed in terms of the signals of the writer's
attitudes and judgment and the argumentative procedures adopted, whether inspired by logical
deduction, or inductively based on facts or examples, or simply derived on an analogical basis"
(Abdollahzadeh, 2009, p. 12). All argumentative texts promote or evaluate certain beliefs or
ideas with conceptual relations such a reason, significance, or opposition frequently. It seems
that in argumentative texts evaluating the opposing theme and holding it against the writers' main
argument and finally making conclusive arguments requires heavier use of contrastive and
conclusive discourse markers. As a result, to be more rhetorically effective, undergraduate
students resort to these markers to make their points more convincing, argumentative, and
evaluative in nature.
A high dominance of one marker within each discourse markers category, as well as an almost
symbolic incidence of other discourse markers in the same category, seems to be a distinctive
were: and, but, because, when and however. A possible reason for the strong dominance lies in
their abundant presence in the current EFL teaching materials. They are precisely those markers
to which participants had been exposed since the beginning of EFL learning, primarily through
textbooks from secondary school to university textbooks. In my opinion, this should hardly be
surprising since, according to Fraser (in Fischer, 2006), these markers, particularly and and but,
are regarded as primary discourse markers within their respective groups, performing a wide
range of discourse functions. In Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:
Learning, teaching, assessment (2001), at the intermediate level of communicative language
competence (the level which university sample group was expected to have attained) learners are
expected to be capable of connecting words by means of conjunctions like and, but and because.
However, the high dominance of these basic markers in written production of university
participants suggests that English discourse markers are, generally speaking, neglected in
Vietnamese EFL classrooms. Therefore, the researcher tend to agree with the suggestion that the
poor range of discourse markers and high frequencies of particular markers in the language
production of EFL students as a consequence of unnatural linguistic input to which they seem to
be exposed. In addition, current language teaching approaches at secondary and high schools are
still largely focused on grammar, and on literal or propositional (semantic) meaning of words
rather than on their pragmatic use.
IV.2. Implications
The present study can have a number of pedagogical implications. The findings of the
present study showed that students at Business English Department do not use the high
frequency of discourse markers and that they used some particular Elaborative markers like and
in a significantly higher manner than other markers. This overuse can be a sign of weakness on
the part of these learners in their writings. This implies that teachers can work more on
incorporating the use of discourse markers in their teaching. In other words, teachers need to
raise the awareness of variety of vocabulary that students are encouraged to use when writing.
In addition, the lack of the relationship between writing quality and frequency of discourse
markers use can imply that the use of discourse markers has not been done appropriately and
purposefully by undergraduate EFL learners. Thus, teachers can work not only on the quantity of
the appropriate use of individual categories of discourse markers and how they can be used in
creating a coherent text. They would also need to let the learners realize that discourse markers
are not only the textual devices which can add to the quality of a text. Rather there are other
elements in addition to discourse markers (like the use of noun phrase, ellipsis, substitution, etc)
that can make a text more cohesive and thus, add to the quality of the writing essays.
PART THREE: CONCLUSION
In this part, the main findings of the study will be concluded. In addition, limitations and
suggestions of the study are also revealed.
1. Conclusions
Discourse markers are lexical expressions which signal the relationship of the basic message to
the foregoing discourse. In the other word, discourse markers establish the logical relationship
between ideas within a sentence or between sentences. They also improve the flow and
coherence of writing that is a smooth movement from one idea or piece of information in a text
to the next. Discourse markers are, thus, guideposts for readers that help them to better follow
order to reach the aim of the research, the development of the research is divided into three main
parts. Part A provides readers with aims and objectives of research. Then Part B Development
carrying the main content contains three chapters. Chapter I provide readers with theoretical
knowledge about discourse markers and the main types of discourse markers. Chapter II is
supplied with methodology used in the research including the information about participants, the
instrument and procedure of the research. Chapter 3 supplies readers with findings and
discussions of the research and aims at answering two research questions concerning the link
between the frequency of use of discourse markers and quality of writing essays.
2. Suggestions for further research
I would like to suggest that further research be undertaken to throw more light on the use
of discourse markers in academic argumentative and discursive composition to analyze the
frequency of use of discourse markers and effect of using discourse markers on the quality of
two types of writings. This direction would help educators gain clear look about the features of
discourse markers in two most important kinds of essay at university and modify teaching
procedures and incorporate a more precise plan for teaching writing.
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