Discourse and Stance Markers in ESL Students’ Reflective Essays
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Discourse markers
stance
ESL students
reflective essays
structure
function
framework
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