The effect of teaching Structural Discourse Markers in an EFL classroom setting
[...] Recent studies in corpus linguistics have examined specific aspects of spoken grammar particularly in unplanned speech. According to McCarthy and Carter (2001), spoken grammars have uniquely special qualities that distinguish them from written ones [...]. In spoken discourse, according to Fung and Carter (2007), the amount and frequency of DM use is significant in comparison to the use of other forms because they serve important interpersonal functions.
Therefore, DMs act as influential interactional features rather than having a purely grammatical function. One of the most important features of DMs is to constitute and organize talk [...]. There is acknowledgement that DMs have a pragmatic meaning in discourse and consequently play a significant role in speakers’ pragmatic competence because they contribute to the pragmatic meaning of utterances. Thus, there is the view that DMs contribute to the interpretation of an utterance rather than to its propositional content [...].
There are a limited number of studies conducted on the instruction of DMs in EFL contexts. All studies revealed similar findings, namely explicit instruction has a positive impact on learners’ production. The main difference being that each study focused on a different genre: writing skills, oral production and listening comprehension, respectively. In all these studies the addition of a post-test would have been beneficial to measure the long-lasting effects of teaching DMs on learners’ acquisition.
Rahimi and Riasati (2012) stated that using DMs will help learners to perform better in spoken skills. In English as a Second Language context (ESL) Jones (2009) carried out a small-scale study with two groups, both of which were given the same DMs using two different teaching approaches: illustration, interaction and induction (III) and presentation, practice and production (PPP). The results demonstrated that PPP had a considerable effect on learners’ use of the taught DMs [...].
Available in: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1101735.pdf. Acess on: Feb. 2, 2026.
According to the text’s perspective,
