Discourse Marker Usage in Argumentative Essays by Saudi Learners of English as Foreign Language: A Quantitative Corpus-based Study

Understanding the discourse marker usage of Arabic-speaking English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners is necessary to help improve their writing competence. However, previous studies focusing on this area have used small corpora for comparison. To make up for this, this study aimed to determine the frequency of use of discourse markers in Saudi EFL argumentative writing by examining large corpora. Hypothesizing that Saudi EFL learners would overuse discourse markers, this study compared a corpus of argumentative essays written by Saudi students majoring in English (comprising 42,560 words) to a sub-corpus of the LOCNESS corpus containing argumentative essays by American and British students (comprising 43,025 words). The frequency of each group’s use of discourse markers were calculated and treated with statistical tests. In both corpora, elaborative discourse markers (EDMs) and temporal discourse markers (TDMs) had the highest and lowest frequencies, respectively. In the Saudi students’ writings, EDMs represented the highest portion of discourse markers (51.3%), followed by contrastive discourse markers (CDMs) (30.7%) and inferential discourse markers (IDMs) (12.7%). These patterns were observed among native speakers as well, with 56.1% of their discourse markers in the elaborative category, followed by CDMs (31%) and IDMs (9.5%). Temporal discourse markers were the least frequently utilized category in both corpora (native corpus: 3.5%; non-native corpus: 5.2%). Based on the study findings, recommendations are provided to strengthen Arabic EFL learners' proficiency in the use of discourse markers.