An investigation into correlation between discourse markers usage frequency and argumentative writing skills by students at Business English Department, National Economics University

The major concern of this research is to reveal the link between the frequency of using discourse markers in argumentative essays and quality of writing essays after counting the average

Nghiên cứu mối quan hê ̣ giữa sử du ̣ng dấu hiê ̣u diễn ngôn và kĩ năng viết luân của sinh viên Tiếng Anh Thương Ma ̣i trường Kinh Tế Quốc Dân

Đỗ Thị Kiều Lan

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn ThS ngành: Ngôn Ngư ̃ Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15 Người hướng dẫn: Assoc Prof Dr Võ Đại Quang

Năm bảo vệ: 2012

Abstract: This research seeks to understand the usage frequency of discourse markers in

argumentative essays and the relationship between the frequency and students‟ proficiency level The major concern of this research is to reveal the link between the frequency of using discourse markers in argumentative essays and quality of writing essays after counting the average percentage of discourse markers in each group of students‟ argumentative essays The study also provides several implications for educators and teachers on teaching academic writing and especially argumentative essays

to raise the students‟ awareness of the appropriate use of individual categories of discourse markers and how they can be used in creating a coherent text The participants are 38 second-year students, of Business and Foreign Languages, National Economics University Their essays were the primary data for the detailed linguistics analysis

Keywords: Tiếng Anh; Kỹ năng viết; Bài luận; Dấu hiệu diễn ngôn; Phương pháp giảng

dạy

Content

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Vietnamese government views English as a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and doing business Therefore, a command of English is emphasized, and English is a required subject in public schools as well as private schools where grammar is unofficially main focus in the process

of teaching and studying Vietnamese students, especially those whose major field is related to English, however, face considerable challenges as they begin their tertiary studies Therefore, they need to familiarize themselves with the requirement and purposes for writing argument genres from the training institution They need to realize the significance of argumentative writing skills and factor that contributes to the flow of argumentative essays content namely

discourse markers or transitional signals and develop control over language- discourse markers

to improve the express arguments persuasively and directly

Within the past fifteen years or so, there has been an increasing interest in the theoretical status

of discourse markers in spoken language and written language To date, there have been a few studies undertaken to explore the discourse markers usage in writing in general There has not yet been a study done that investigated fully the correlation between discourse markers usage and quality of argumentative writing essays The current study is hereby designed to examine the relationship between the frequency usage of discourse markers and argumentative writing skills

by students at Business English Department, National Economics University

2 Scope of the study

The discourse marker is a vast topic in English teaching and learning in which various aspect and functions of it have been under research It would ambitious to cover so many aspects in this study Therefore, the area investigated of the study is the correlation between frequency usage of discourse markers and argumentative writing kills and subjects of the study are 38 second-year students at Business English Department, National Economics University

3 Aims and objectives of the study

3.1 Aims of the study

vThe study aims at helping students recognize the significance of discourse markers in writing argumentative essay and then applying them in their writing by providing them knowledge on types of discourse markers, and functions of each type

3.2 Objectives of the study

By helping students recognize the importance of discourse markers, the study will firstly (1) examine the frequency of use of discourse markers in argumentative essays written by 38 second year students at Business English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, National Economics University More specifically, it will seek the average percentage of discourse markers and their types in argumentative essays The study, then, (2) discloses the relationship between the frequency of discourse markers and students‟ writing quality

4 Research questions

In this study the answers to the following research questions were of particular interest:

1 What is the usage frequency of English discourse markers in students‟ argumentative

essays?

2 How does the frequency of use of discourse markers correlate with the quality of written

essays?

To answer these questions, a study employing detailed linguistic analysis will be pursued The

primary data comprises the analysis of argumentative essays written in Academic writing course

by 38 students at Business English Department, National Economics University

5 Design of the study

The thesis is divided into three main parts including Introduction, Development and

Conclusion In part A, readers will be informed of the real situation in teaching and

learning academic writing and the urgent need leading to the study being conducted

Also, the writer will mention the aims and objectives of the study In the second part,

Development, there are three chapters: Literature review supplies background

information of terms, and summary of previous researches; Methodology describes

carefully the participants, the research instruments and the research procedure; Findings

and Discussions reveals the results of the study and implications for the teaching of

argumentative essay writing Conclusion is the final part wrapping up the thesis

PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW

I.1 English study in Vietnam

I.1.1 English study in Vietnam and National Economics University

I.1.2 Issues in writing academic arguments

I.2 Studies related to the topic

I.3 Definition and background information of terms

I.3.1 Definition of academic writing and argumentative essay

I.3.2 Discourse markers

I.3.2.1 Definition of discourse markers

I.3.2.2 Properties of discourse markers

I.3.2.3 Types of discourse markers

I.3.2.4 Role of discourse markers in writing

CHAPTER TWO: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

1 Background of the site for data collection

The argumentative essays examined in this study arouse out of Writing semester 4 that students

at Business English Department have to complete the Writing skill is taught in four semesters from Writing 1 and 2 about Sentence writing to Writing 3 about Paragraph writing and Writing 4 about Essay Writing 4 is designed for the students majored in English of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, NEU, whose level of English is upper-intermediate and have completed one section for Sentence Writing, and two sections for Paragraph Writing The course provides students with basic knowledge of essay organization, unity and coherence, ways to improve academic writing style In the next part of the course, students go through different kinds of essay: process analysis, cause and effect, classification, reaction, comparison and contrast, discussion essays and especially argumentative essays are the emphasis With various practice tasks, writing in each lesson comes in its natural process: gathering vocabulary and ideas for a topic, brainstorming and outlining, writing, and editing This course aims at equipping students with fundamental understanding of the essay first, and then supplying them with practice tasks in writing different kinds of essay Moreover, the course also raises students‟ awareness of using the right academic writing style, encourages them to edit their own writing, and acquaints them with timed writing

2 Data gathering technique

The data gained is primary data consisting students‟ essays This section explains how data was obtained

At the start of 13-week course, the researcher attended writing sessions to observe nature of writing training and practice During the attendance, the course syllabus and the student workbook and worksheet were obtained Also, the researcher approached students in those sessions to distribute Invitation letters (Appendix A), which informed them of the research project as well as inviting them to participate Invitation letters were sent via students‟ emails as well Willing students were asked to fill in the Student Information Sheet (Appendix B) for demographic information about their education, language proficiency

3 The participants

A sample of 38 participants include all second year students They all started learning English in fourth grade of primary school at the age of 10 and had been exposed to the same total number of lessons of English None of the participants had spent any considerable time in an English-speaking country

4 Instruments

The instrument used in the study was a writing test designed and validated by Cambridge University The test was taken from Cambridge Practice Test for IELTS 6 It consisted of 4 parts: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking In Writing part, there are two smaller tasks: task 1 and 2 In this study, the researcher only took one task: Writing task 2 Participants were delivered the test with the topic, topic requirement and space for them to write their essays

5 Procedure

Both sample groups were tested on the same day in order to avoid participants informing each other about the task content The testing was conducted in a usual classroom environment during regular English classes It lasted for 40 minutes and participants‟ English teacher was present during the test Care was taken that teachers were not aware of the final aim of the study The researcher did not want to reveal in advance her intention to focus on discourse markers prior to

or during the writing task Also, she did not disclose in advance the topic participants were to write on in order to avoid possible student temptation or teacher temptation to prepare for writing about this particular topic

The topic of the argumentative essay was “Today, the high sales of popular consumer goods

reflect the power of advertising and not the real needs of the society in which they are sold To what extent do you agree or disagree?”

The essays were reviewed by the researcher with regard to two aspects First, the discourse markers used in the essays were tallied for later analysis In addition, the essays were scored with respect to their quality In order to ensure the reliability of scoring,

20% of the essays were scored by the researcher and an experienced university professor who completed her MA course of TESOL at University of Queensland, Australia and then the inter-rater reliability of the scores was estimated through Chronbach‟s Alpha formula for inter-inter-rater reliability; the obtained reliability index was 0.75, which is an acceptable reliability index Then the rest of the essays were scored by the researcher, herself

In order to answer the first question regarding the frequency of the use of discourse markers, the frequency of the overall discourse markers used in each essay type were calculated There an analysis of discourse markers was conducted This implied identifying and classifying all discourse markers found in the corpus of compositions In identifying discourse markers, the writer relied on Fraser‟s (1999) classifications In this way four groups of markers were formed: Elaborative, Contrastive, Inferential and Temporal markers Then the frequencies were turned into percentages to have a clearer picture of the use of individual discourse markers used in each essay type Then, the discourse markers were classified with respect to the category of the cohesive devices they belonged to This time the mean scores of the use of discourse markers belonging to different categories were calculated This allowed the researchers to statistically compare the use of different categories of discourse markers across different text types

Finally, basing on the frequency of use of discourse markers and the percentage, the researcher draw the conclusion about the correlation between the number of discourse markers

and quality of essay writing

CHAPTER THREE: DATA ANALYSIS

This chapter will present the results of the study and the analysis of the data collected

III.1 Test Analysis

To answer research question 1, the researcher counted the number of discourse markers and the total word count of each essay Then, she could work out the frequency of use of English discourse markers that students use when writing their argumentative essays To investigate the correlation between the frequency of use of discourse markers and quality of essays, the researcher analyzed the essay to examine whether the large number of discourse markers used could lead to the high quality or the high score or not

III.1.1 Frequency of discourse markers

Table 3: Distribution of discourse markers in all essays

Group Total number of

essays

Number of words Number of

discourse markers

Ratio of discourse markers per 100

Results showed that the subjects in this study employed a small number of discourse markers in their essays Among three groups, group 3 whose range of mark was from 0 to 5 was the ones who employed more discourse markers than other two groups, 7.21 % This proportion of group

3 was higher in comparison with group 1 whose mark ranged from 7 to 10 5.55% was the figure

of group 1 and group 2 ranked the second with the ratio was 5.79% In conclusion, the data indicated that although group 1 including students with higher marks than group 2 and 3, they used less number of discourse markers in their argumentative essays And surprisingly, students coming from 3 were those who applied most number of discourse markers and took up the highest percentage compared to other two groups Thus, the frequency of use of discourse markers in students‟ writing presented no correlation with the quality of students‟ essays

III.1.2 Frequency of type of discourse markers

The data analysis reveals that in the total number of 174 discourse markers used in 10

essays of students in group 1, half of them belonged to Elaborative markers such as and, also and

or Contrastive markers ranked the second with the percentage of 23.12, half of the percentage of

Elaborative markers Normally, students tended to use several discourse markers namely

however, although or on the other hand to show opposing ideas The two last types of discourse

markers were Inferential markers and Temporal markers taking up the percent of 13.78 and 12.64 respectively

After the students finished the two exams, I collected and analyzed errors they committed

in those papers The errors then were identified and categorized and the most typical and common errors were presented In general, the students made errors both in using language and organization

The conclusion could be drawn from data analysis about frequency and percentage of types of discourse markers in group 1 essays was that students used Elaborative markers most

By calculating the ratio four main types of discourse markers used in group 2 essays, researchers concluded that 50.78% of all discourse markers employed in essays fell into Elaborative markers This figure was more than two times the use of Contrastive markers and more than three times and four times the use of Inferential and Temporal markers The following extract was taken from essay of Subject 2 to illustrate the frequency of use of four discourse markers especially Elaborative markers Among these 3 types, naturally Elaborative markers were heavily used

Taking a case of a fat man, he is lazy and overeat, but he wishes to lose weight without doing exercises or cutting the meals when he watches a TV commercial of a losing-weight bell A model on that advertisement just need to wear the bell and relax, her weight will be reduced 2

kilos after a week Therefore, the fat man purchase that product after watching an

advertisement

In only three sentences, and was used 2 times, this student also used or which belong to

Elaborative markers Three other types of discourse markers were used once for each type

III.1.3 Correlation between the use of discourse markers and quality of argumentative writing essays

It is crystal clear that there was no correlation between frequency of use of discourse markers and quality of writing essays In the first place, the number of discourse markers used in essays accounted for small one, only 5.55% per 100 words in group 1 and 7.21% per 100 words in group 3 Although group 1 were those who got higher marks than group 3, students in group 1 still employed smaller number of discourse markers in their writing Therefore, discourse markers were not a factor that influenced the quality of writing which was determined by the integrated skills The following example of subject 2 in group 2 will prove that

CHAPTER FOUR: MAJOR FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS

IV.1 Synthesis of the findings and discussions

The study attempted to answer two research questions

(1) What is the frequency of use of English discourse markers when students write argumentative essays?

(2) How does the frequency of use of discourse markers correlate with quality of writing essays?

by calculating the number of discourse markers used in essays and investigated the correlation between the frequency of use of discourse markers and the quality of writing essays

The results of the study showed that Elaborative markers were the most frequently used cohesive devices in argumentative essays The means for the use of these markers and the percentage of them turned out to be much higher than those of the other discourse markers These results are in line with those of other studies showing that Elaborative markers are those frequently used cohesive devices This might imply that the use of Elaborative markers is more closely related to argumentative compositions than other types of discourse markers The most commonly used

Elaborative markers in text types were and, also, moreover and or, among which and was used

in a significantly higher quantity than other markers

The extensive use of Elaborative markers may also be due to the fact that argumentative texts entail expressing an opinion and trying to persuade the reader by providing reasons for argument and, at the same time, presenting the opposing view and refuting it It deals with the mental process of judging "Argumentations can be analyzed in terms of the signals of the writer's attitudes and judgment and the argumentative procedures adopted, whether inspired by logical deduction, or inductively based on facts or examples, or simply derived on an analogical basis" (Abdollahzadeh, 2009, p 12) All argumentative texts promote or evaluate certain beliefs or ideas with conceptual relations such a reason, significance, or opposition frequently It seems that in argumentative texts evaluating the opposing theme and holding it against the writers' main argument and finally making conclusive arguments requires heavier use of contrastive and conclusive discourse markers As a result, to be more rhetorically effective, undergraduate students resort to these markers to make their points more convincing, argumentative, and evaluative in nature

A high dominance of one marker within each discourse markers category, as well as an almost symbolic incidence of other discourse markers in the same category, seems to be a distinctive feature of the participants‟ essays Discourse markers having appreciably the highest frequencies

were: and, but, because, when and however A possible reason for the strong dominance lies in

their abundant presence in the current EFL teaching materials They are precisely those markers

to which participants had been exposed since the beginning of EFL learning, primarily through textbooks from secondary school to university textbooks In my opinion, this should hardly be

surprising since, according to Fraser (in Fischer, 2006), these markers, particularly and and but,

are regarded as primary discourse markers within their respective groups, performing a wide range of discourse functions In Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (2001), at the intermediate level of communicative language competence (the level which university sample group was expected to have attained) learners are expected to be capable of connecting words by means of conjunctions like and, but and because However, the high dominance of these basic markers in written production of university participants suggests that English discourse markers are, generally speaking, neglected in Vietnamese EFL classrooms Therefore, the researcher tend to agree with the suggestion that the poor range of discourse markers and high frequencies of particular markers in the language production of EFL students as a consequence of unnatural linguistic input to which they seem to

be exposed In addition, current language teaching approaches at secondary and high schools are

still largely focused on grammar, and on literal or propositional (semantic) meaning of words rather than on their pragmatic use

IV.2 Implications

The present study can have a number of pedagogical implications The findings of the present study showed that students at Business English Department do not use the high frequency of discourse markers and that they used some particular Elaborative markers like and

in a significantly higher manner than other markers This overuse can be a sign of weakness on the part of these learners in their writings This implies that teachers can work more on incorporating the use of discourse markers in their teaching In other words, teachers need to raise the awareness of variety of vocabulary that students are encouraged to use when writing

In addition, the lack of the relationship between writing quality and frequency of discourse markers use can imply that the use of discourse markers has not been done appropriately and purposefully by undergraduate EFL learners Thus, teachers can work not only on the quantity of cohesive devices but also on their quality They would need to raise the students‟ awareness of the appropriate use of individual categories of discourse markers and how they can be used in creating a coherent text They would also need to let the learners realize that discourse markers are not only the textual devices which can add to the quality of a text Rather there are other elements in addition to discourse markers (like the use of noun phrase, ellipsis, substitution, etc) that can make a text more cohesive and thus, add to the quality of the writing essays

PART THREE: CONCLUSION

In this part, the main findings of the study will be concluded In addition, limitations and suggestions of the study are also revealed

1 Conclusions

Discourse markers are lexical expressions which signal the relationship of the basic message to the foregoing discourse In the other word, discourse markers establish the logical relationship between ideas within a sentence or between sentences They also improve the flow and coherence of writing that is a smooth movement from one idea or piece of information in a text

to the next Discourse markers are, thus, guideposts for readers that help them to better follow the text, promote written communication, and reader‟s comprehension of coherent discourse In order to reach the aim of the research, the development of the research is divided into three main parts Part A provides readers with aims and objectives of research Then Part B Development carrying the main content contains three chapters Chapter I provide readers with theoretical knowledge about discourse markers and the main types of discourse markers Chapter II is