The use of discourse markers in spoken English by Iraqi EFL learners at university level

الملخص EN

Discourse markers (DMs) play an important role in discourse whether written or spoken due to the coherence and cohesiveness they create in a text.

Therefore, they attracted the attention of researchers and scholars in many fields, especially in Second Language Writing (SLW) and Discourse analysis (DA) in both EFL and ESL contexts.

The aim of this study is to address DMs in the conversation of Iraqi senior EFL university students rather than their writing product since much research has extensively studied EFL students’ writing.

Data were collected via audio recordings of students’ spoken discourse about a given topic.

After transcribing the data orthographically, AntConc software was used to identify any frequency pattern(s) of DMs sequence.

Then the hidden statistical tools in Word were used to analyze the data statistically to see the difference in using DMs between male and female participants.

The findings indicated that the students used DMs in various rates in their spoken discourse: RDMs (70%), followed by IDMs (15%), SDMs (10%), and CDMs (5%).

It has also been concluded that female participants used DMs more proficiently in their conversations than their male counterparts.

Also, both genders overused some RDM terms, such as “and’, “or”, “and”, and “but” and misused others due to L1 and L2 interference.

The study comes out with several recommendations about improving Iraqi EFL students’ ability to use DMs in their spoken production and provided suggestions for related future work.