A Contrastive Study on Transitional Markers in English Language Teaching Research Articles Written by English and Persian Academic Writers

Abstract

<p>The present study attempted to work on the distributions of the Transitional Markers in a corpus of thirty articles related to the discipline of English Language Teaching. All of the articles are written in English, fifteen by academic writers who are native speakers of English and the other fifteen by Persian academic writers. Using descriptive statistics, it was revealed that the Transitional Markers belonging to the categories of <em>contrast </em>and <em>purpose </em>were more used by native writers and Transitional Markers belonging to the category of <em>comparison &amp; similarity</em> were used almost equally by both groups of writers. Transitional Markers belonging to the categories of <em>addition, time, result, place, example </em>and <em>summary &amp; emphasis </em>were more used in the ELT articles written by Persian article writers. Moreover, using inferential statistics, it was indicated that a significant difference exist between the uses of the Transitional Markers in the two groups of the articles.</p

A Contrastive Study on the Utilization of Discourse Markers in the Discussion Section of English Research Articles

“…Besides, elaborative DMs which "introduce the units of discourse which repeat and emphasize the key point or add relevant new information to the expressions mentioned previously and maintain the text's cohesion and coherence" turned out to be the most used category of DMs in both corpora (Suleiman & Seyyedi, 2020, p. 57). This goes in line with Elahi and Badeleh's (2013) study which demonstrated that the NNSs of English preferred the additive DMs (which is another term for elaborative DMs) more than contrastive and inferential DMs. Furthermore, the elaborative DM "and" was excessively used in both corpora.…”

“…Before that, it is worth recalling that the LTR corpus utilized more elaborative, contrastive, inferential DMs than the AJMG corpus. Nevertheless, the AJMG corpus exhibited a relatively higher degree of utilization of temporal DMs which goes hand in hand with the results of Elahi and Badeleh's (2013) and Hussein and Mudhhi's (2014) studies which demonstrated that temporal DMs were more used in a corpus of NNSs' compositions than a comparative corpus of NSs' writings. However, there are three possible explanations for such discrepancies between the two current corpora.…”

“…The study demonstrated that the Czech students overly used DMs in their writings, whereas the native authors barely applied DMs all over their papers. Another study was conducted by Elahi and Badeleh (2013) that examined the distribution of DMs in RAs that were published on English Language Teaching (ELT) journal by native speakers of English (NSs) and non-native speakers of English (NNSs). The NNSs had a Persian background.…”

Examining the challenges experienced by trainee teachers in use of transitional devices to achieve cohesion in writing in St. Francis and St. Teresa’s Colleges of Education, Ghana

“…Studies have proved that writing is indispensable to civic and academic life, that cohesion plays a very important role in writing and that the use of transitional devices is one main ways by which cohesion and coherence can be achieved in various writing forms. Some of these researchers have looked at the factors that influence students' use of transitional devices (Aidinlou and Reshadi, 2014;Hinkel, 2001;Mohamed-Sayidina, 2010), the problems students face in the use of transitional devices, the problems students face in using transitional devices (Darweesh & Kadhim, 2016;Schleppegrell, 1996), the causes of students' problems with the use of transitional devices (Almaden, 2006;Astanti, Rozimela & Fitrawati, 2016;Elahi & Badeleh, 2013) and the measures that need to be put in place to improve students' use of transitional devices (Andayani, Seken & Marjohan, 2014;Astanti et al, 2016;Mahendra & Dewi, 2017).…”