Discourse Markers in Peer Reviews of Academic Essays By Future Teachers of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This article presents and discusses a quantitative investigation of discourse markers (further – DMs) in the corpus of peer reviews of academic essays in didactics written by a group of future teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In total, 12 future EFL teachers at an intermediate level of EFL proficiency (henceforth – participants) took part in the study. The participants were instructed to form dyads and write peer reviews of each other’s academic essays on a range of topics in EFL didactics. Two corpora were used in the study, the corpus of the participants’ academic essays in EFL didactics and the corpus of peer reviews thereof. The corpora were analysed using WordSmith (Scott 2008) in order to establish the frequencies of the use of DMs per 1000 words. The results of the quantitative analysis of the corpora indicated that the participants employed a repertoire of stylistically neutral DMs in their peer reviews that was quantitatively similar to that of the academic essays. These findings will be further discussed in the article.

Citation and Referencing Practices in Argumentative Essay Writing by Upper-Intermediate EFL Students

“…Importantly, the linguo-didactic premises of the teaching and learning of argumentative essay writing involve a substantial focus on argumentation that is supported by credible sources, which, in turn, are appropriately referenced in accordance with referencing conventions, such as the American Psychological Association (APA) or Harvard referencing style (Alexander et al, 2023;Sato, 2022;Tabari & Johnson, 2023). However, the literature routinely points out that undergraduate EFL students encounter multiple challenges in their learning trajectory that is associated with the mastering of a range of skills that encompass the rhetorical underpinnings of argumentative essays writing, academic writing in general, and citation and referencing skills in particular (Kapranov, 2021a;Awada et al, 2020;Kamimura, 2014;Van Weijen et al, 2019).…”