Discourse Markers in EFL Student Presentations

Abstract

. Discourse Markers (DMs) have a significant role both in oral and written communication. DMs particularly in spoken language support the audience in interpreting meanings. In a discourse, all segments indicate distinct connections. The relations of the segments vary from changing topics, contrasting, elaborating, to inferring. By the use of DMs, the hearers can guess the signal of connections among segments. Despite various choices of DMs that can be used, EFL learners had a tendency to use only common DMs. The use of DMs in an EFL context is interesting to discuss to reveal the students’ ability in building cohesion and coherence in their speaking performances. Therefore, this current research is aimed to find out the most frequently used variants of DMs and to investigate the appropriate and inappropriate uses of DMs in student presentations. The discourse analysis was applied to analyze 86 presentation videos produced by students enrolling in Intermediate Speaking Course. The results revealed that the most frequently used DMs are and, also, but, so, and however. The misuses of DMs were mostly pertinent to the overuse and surface logicality.