Functional Analysis of Frame Markers in Students' Essays: An Across Disciplinary Study
Subject Areas : Journal of Teaching English Language StudiesAzadeh Mallaki 1 , Seyed Foad Ebrahimi 2 , Mohammad Taghi Farvardin 3
1 - Department of English Language Teaching, Bushehr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bushehr, Iran.
2 - Department of English Language Teaching, Shadegan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shadegan, Iran.
3 - Department of English Language Teaching, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran.
Keywords: Philosophy, Psychology, Frame Markers, Metadiscourse Marker, MICUSP,
Abstract :
Frame markers are a broad interactive subcategory, displaying the writer-reader relationships. They can be characterized as items to frame information about discourse components and functioning for argument sequencing, labelling, predicting, and shifting while offering readers more discourse clarity. How to make good use of frame markers becomes one of the focuses in English writing classes. Thus, this study investigates the frequency and functions of frame markers in academic students' essays. To this end, 56 students' essays (totally 170.760 words) were selected from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), belonging to Philosophy and Psychology disciplines. The corpus was analysed considering Hyland's (2005) model of interactive metadiscourse into frequency and functions. The results showed that the frame markers were frequent enough to be considered in teaching writing genres. Besides, frame markers exhibited a significantly essential way, allowing writers organize their discourse according to certain audience and enabling them to observe the argument coherence and directing their thoughts toward what the author wished. Disciplinary differences concerning frequencies, types and functions of the frame markers were reported. The study results could directly be used in the syllabus designed for writing academic genres.
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