VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HCM CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE THE PERCEPTIONS AND USE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN ESSAY WRITING OF ENGLISH MAJORS AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE – UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES – NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HO CHI MINH CITY A thesis submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in TESOL By TRẦN PHƯƠNG VY Supervised by NGUYỄN THỊ KIỀU THU, Ph. HO CHI MINH CITY, OCTOBER 2021 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my sincere thanks and special gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu, who read my manuscript with great care, gave insightful comments, and provided valuable support in the preparation and completion of this thesis. Without her guidance and persistent help this thesis could not have been possible.
Additionally, I would like to send my special thanks to all teachers who gave me remarks and advice, which are invaluable for the thesis. In particular, I would like to thank Mr. Vo Duy Minh who generously dedicated his time shared with me his experience as a writing teacher and Dr. Luu Trong Tuan for his comments, suggestion, and encouragement.
My special thanks go to all the students who were very responsive to the questionnaires and the interviews. Also, I would like to thank the faculty members at USSH-EF who provided me with the full assistance whenever I needed it. Last but not least, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my family and my friends for their love, caring, understanding, and continuing support to complete this thesis. i STATEMENT OF ORGIGINALITY I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: THE PERCEPTIONS AND USE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN ESSAY WRITING OF ENGLISH MAJORS AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE – UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES – NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HO CHI MINH CITY In terms of the statement of Requirements for Theses in Master’s Program issued by the Higher Degree Committee of the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature, University of Social Sciences & Humanities, National University Ho Chi Minh City.
Ho Chi Minh City, October 2021 TRAN PHUONG VY ii RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I, TRẦN PHƢƠNG VY, hereby state that I being the candidate for the degree of Master in TESOL accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of the theses. Ho Chi Minh City, October 2021 Signature: TRAN PHUONG VY iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements. i Statement of originality.
ii Retention and Use of the Thesis. iii Table of Contents. iv List of Tables. viii List of Figures.
ix List of Abbreviations. xi CHAPTER 1: Introduction. Background to the study. Statement of the problem.
Aims and objectives of the study. Significance of the study. Scope of the study. Definitions of key terms.
Organization of thesis chapters. 08 CHAPTER 2: Literature review. English Discourse markers. Defining English Discourse markers.
Discourse markers and Cohesive devices. Discourse markers in writing skills. Major approaches to Discourse markers. Coherence-based account of Discourse markers.
Discourse coherence approach. Grammar-pragmatic approach. Relevance-based account of Discourse markers. Relevance theory framework.
Rhetorical structure theory. Functions of English Discourse markers. Characteristics of English Discourse markers. Classifications of Discourse Markers.
Discourse marker classifications in studies relating to writing skills. Adapted Discourse marker classification and list. Mechanism of adapting the discourse marker classification. The discourse marker classification used in the study.
Previous studies relating to discourse markers in essay writing skills. Conceptual framework of the study. Research site and time. Participants for the questionnaire.
Participants for the interview. Essays written by students. Data collection procedures. Data collected from the questionnaire.
Data collected from the interviews. Data collected from the essay written by students. Data analysis procedures. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.
Item-total correlation coefficient. Exploratory Factor Analysis. Percentage and Column/Pie charts. Assumptions of the study.
56 CHAPTER 4: Results and Discussions. Analyzing data collected from the research questionnaire. Analyzing data collected from the interviews and the essays. The essay written by the students.
Students’ perceptions of discourse markers. Students’ perceptions of DMs on characteristics of DMs. Students’ perceptions of DMs on functions of DMs. Students’ perceptions of DMs on learning DMs attitudes.
Students’ perceptions of DMs on pedagogical value of DMs. Students’ perceptions of DMs on practical value of DMs. Students’ use of discourse markers. Commonness and Differences of using discourse markers in essay writing.
Inappropriateness of using discourse markers in essay writing. Summary of findings. Recommendations for further studies .105 Appendix 1- Research questionnaire (English and Vietnamese version) …. 115 vi Appendix 3- Lists of discourse markers suggested by scholars.
128 Appendix 4- An example of DM used in essays. 133 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Pragmatic functions of DMs adapted from Briton (1996) .1: The students’ distributions.2: The function of questionnaire items.3: The function of questions in the Interview.4: Essays written by students.1: Results of KMO and Bartlett’s test .2: Results of Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings .3: Results of extracting factors by dimension reduction analysis .4: Model summary table of the linear regression analysis .5: ANOVA table of the linear regression analysis .6: Regression model of the linear regression analysis .7: Reliability statistics of the five factors .8: Students’ use of DMs in 113 essays (averagely) .9: Students’ use of DMs in 113 essays per the kinds of essays .10: Descriptive statistic results for the factor Characteristics of DMs .11: Descriptive statistic results for the factor Functions of DMs .12: Descriptive statistic results for the factor Learning DMs attitudes .13: Descriptive statistic results for the factor Pedagogical value of DMs .14: Descriptive statistic results for the factor Practical value of DMs .15: Students’ use of DMs types per the kinds of essays .1: DMs used averagely in essays with different kinds of essays .2: Student’s use of DM types .3: Student’s use of DM types per the kinds of essays .4: Student’s use of DM types. 93 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Conceptual Framework of the study .1: Research design of the study .1: The proportion of DM types suggested by the interviewees .2: The most frequent DMs suggested by 16 interviewees .3: The proportion of DM types used by the students in their essays .4: The most frequent DMs used in 113 essays .5: The proportion of DM types used in different kinds of essays .6: The distribution of student’s perceptions of DMs on the characteristics of DMs .7: The distribution of student’s perceptions of DMs on the functions of DMs .8: The distribution of student’s perceptions of DMs by learning DMs attitudes .9: The distribution of student’s perceptions of DMs by learning DMs attitudes .10: The distribution of student’s perceptions of DMs on practical value of DMs .11: The proportion of inappropriate DMs used by the students in their essays. 86 ix LIST OF ABBREVATIONS AW Academic Writing DM Discourse marker EF The Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature USSH University of Social Sciences and Humanities – National University Ho Chi Minh City x ABSTRACT This thesis aims to study the perceptions of discourse markers of the students at the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature – University of Social Sciences and Humanities – National University Ho Chi Minh City, and to investigate these students’ use of discourse markers in their essays.
Applying mixed research, the study, on the quantitative paradigm, uses a 26-item Likert responding scale questionnaire to survey the students’ perceptions of discourse markers with the statistical means of Exploratory Factor Analysis. The regression model of the study with all Sig. values of the factors are ≤ 0.05 states that the five factors of Functions of DMs, Characteristics of DMs, Learning attitudes towards DMs, Pedagogical values of DMs, and Practical values of DMs are statistically significantly effective to their ability to perceive discourse markers in the text. Producing the R-value of 0.05 for ANOVA, the Exploratory Factor Analysis’ results are highly predictive and statistically significant.
On the other dimension, students’ use of discourse markers is investigated by using the interview method and counting the discourse markers used in the students’ essays. This dimension finds that the students share some significant commonness when using contrastive DMs, elaborative DMs, and inferential DMs most often as well as have remarkable differences in their use of discourse markers when the kinds of essays, Argumentative, Cause-Effect, Comparison or Contrast, and Process, are taken into consideration. In addition, some inappropriate use of discourse markers are also found by this dimension of the study. Keywords: discourse markers, academic writing, students’ perceptions of DMs, students’ use of DMs, coherence in academic writing.
xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This chapter refers to the general aspects of the thesis titled “The Perceptions and Use of Discourse Markers in Essay Writing of English Majors at the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature – University of Social Sciences and Humanities – National University Ho Chi Minh City”. The chapter begins with the entry “Background to the study”, in which the thesis mentions some issues, as the title mentions, concerning the students at USSH’s perceptions and use of discourse markers with some reasons and objectives referred to in the two next entries, 1.4 formulates three research questions that the study is expected to answer in chapter 5 of this thesis.5, Significances of the study, the contributions of the study help to make the thesis valid.6, Scope of the study, frames the focus of the study and states the reasons that the study does not approach other aspects which are almost relevant to the study. The next entry, then, is for defining the terms used with specific meanings in the study.8 summaries the organization of the thesis. Background to the study Among the four skills of using a language, especially a foreign language, writing is considered as the most important skill that university students have to face in order to enhance both their personal development and their academic success (Mukulu et al.
This skill is also the most challenging one for English as second language learners (Manan & Raslee, 2017). Approaching this skill, students have been challenged by many difficulties, and many researchers have been attempting to find these difficulties in order to introduce students and teachers effective suggestions to help students master the skill. Many different difficulties have been found by researchers, consisting of grammar, punctuation and spelling (Younes & Albalawi, 2015), linguistics, cognitive and psychological problems (Rahmatunisa, 2014), the lack of time allocated to teach writing in classrooms (Almubark, 2016; Ariyanti & 1 Fitrinati, 2017), a wide range of vocabulary and mastery of conventions in mechanics to develop an English piece of writing (Jacobs, 1981; Hall, 1988). Generally, many facets of the difficulties that hinder students to compose pieces of writing as a native speaker have been considered and, to a certain extent, these difficulties are intrapersonal other than interpersonal.