The Impact of Discourse Markers Instruction

The ability to communicate through writing with people from other countries with different cultures through foreign languages has been a concern for man during the history. Many devices, such as substitution, ellipsis, and discourse marker contribute to the cohesion and coherence of a piece of discourse.This book is an attempt to investigate the effect of instruction of discourse markers on EFL learners' narrative writing.Discourse markers (DMs) are a group of linguistic items functioning within cognitive, expressive, social, and textual domains (Schiffrin,2001).Theoretically speaking, DMs are verbal and, at times, non-verbal devices which contribute to the integrity of the discourse (Schiffrin,1987).As far as writing is concerned, the lack or inappropriate use of DMs in an L2 would hinder successful communication or might lead to the lack of comprehension.One interesting and important area of research in second language writing is to see how DMs are used by L2 students.As the construction of a narrative text consists of narrative clauses and the clauses must be connected as coherent as possible,we need toknow how to use discourse markers in order to have coherent narrative text.