Discourse and Stance Markers in ESL Students’ Reflective Essays

This study aimed at determining the discourse and stance markers in ESL students’ reflective essays. A discourse analysis method was used in this study. The quantitative technique was utilized to count the number of instances of discourse and stance markers in reflective essays written by ESL students. Thus, it utilized Fraser’s (1999) taxonomy of DMs to classify the function of discourse markers and Knott’s (1996) Five Syntactic Category to identify the structure of discourse markers. The study made used of Hyland’s (2004) framework of stance to categorize the stance markers and Biber’s (2004) general framework of stance markers. As a result of the study, the discourse markers in ESL students’ reflective essays were classified into contrastive, elaborative, inferential, and temporal as based on Fraser’s (1999) taxonomy of DMs. Based on Knott’s (1966) Five syntactic categories, discourse markers in ESL students’ reflective essays were analyzed as coordinators, subordinators, conjunctive adverbs, prepositions, and prepositional phrases. Stance markers were categorized into hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions. The grammatical structure of stance markers were identified as modals with a semantic categories stance adverbial and complement clauses. It revealed that elaborative discourse markers were the most commonly used. Modals were the most favorable grammatical categories of stance markers. Moreover, it is recommended that language teachers and researchers may use the concept of discourse and stance markers in analyzing the ways in which learners present their ideas logically and critically.