Analysis of Discourse Markers in Thai EFL Students’ Essay Writing: A Case Study of a University in Northern Thailand
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Abstract
In language learning and teaching, writing is one skill that students need to study and improve upon to achieve this, discourse markers play a virtual role. This research, therefore, sought to analyze the use and misuse of discourse markers in the essay writing of Thai EFL students at a university in northern Thailand. Data were collected from 262 essays including 131 argumentative essays and 131 descriptive essays from 131 dual-degree undergraduate students enrolled in a Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts in English program, taking Note-taking and Summarizing for Career course. Quantitatively, the study found that the students mostly use inferential discourse markers, followed by contrastive discourse markers, and elaborative discourse markers, respectively. Moreover, from the qualitative contents analysis, it demonstrated that the students misused discourse makers at sentence level within paragraphs without any clear, link between ideas in the paragraphs. This implies that students need to learn more about cohesion and coherence through the use of discourse markers in writing.
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