engleski

A Corpus-driven Exploration of Lexical Discourse Markers in L2 Academic Texts

Text coherence can be influenced by a number of factors, including the use of discourse markers. A number of studies on non-native use of discourse markers (cf. Milton & Tsang, 1996 ; Granger & Tyson, 1996 ; Bolton et al., 2002 ; Chen, 2006) have revealed that L2 users tend to overuse, misuse or misplace discourse markers. This erroneous use is attributed to their insufficient knowledge of stylistic constraints on the choice of connectors, especially in formal styles, and to their lack of awareness of what constitutes a coherent text in the target language. These assumptions, however, have not been fully confirmed mainly because of few studies that included a small number of languages. This study aims at exploring the use of discourse markers in academic argumentative essays written by non-native users of two foreign languages, English and German, who share the L1. The issues addressed are two-fold and include the similarities and differences in discourse markers use between English and German L2 texts, and the extent to which erroneous use of discourse markers causes coherence disruption. Using a corpus tool (Sketch Engine) to analyse L2 academic texts can contribute to a better understanding of how coherence is established, reduce the subjectivity of qualitative approaches to text coherence analyses, and allow for cross- linguistic comparisons of patterns of rhetorical organization. The results are presented and discussed from two perspectives: acquisitional and methodological. The acquisitional perspective starts from the observation that non-native language users encounter a number of problems when using discourse markers to establish text coherence. The methodological perspective covers the questions as to how errors should be treated prior to corpus analyses and whether corpus analyses may point to coherence breaks.

coherence, discourse markers, argumentative essays, learner corpora, L2 English, L2 German

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