A corpus-based comparative study of discourse markers in Indonesian EFL academic and non-academic writing

Despite being extensively studied in recent years, the research of discourse markers using data from real-life content in Indonesia is rarely discussed. This study investigates the discourse markers in Indonesian EFL students’ writing, focusing on nonacademic and academic writing. This study used a qualitative method to interpret the differences between the discourse markers in nonacademic and academic writing. A corpus-based approach was applied, as the data is a collection of text compiled into corpora. The data were collected through assignments in essay writing course for the nonacademic writing and argumentative writing course for the academic writing. Moreover, the texts were cleaned of unnecessary parts and turned into two corpora: the nonacademic writing corpus and the academic writing corpus. The researcher then analyzed the discourse markers in both corpora by identifying and comparing the frequency, word variety, and how students applied the markers. Eventually, the differences between the use of discourse markers in both corpora were explained. This study reveals that all discourse markers (contrastive, elaborative, inferential, temporal, and spoken) are applied in both corpora. Of all five types of discourse markers, contrastive, inferential, and temporal are dominantly used in nonacademic writing. Meanwhile, elaborative and spoken discourse markers are dominant in academic writing. Furthermore, students in academic writing exhibit more varied markers and even distribution than nonacademic writing students. However, students misuse, overuse, and underuse certain markers in both corpora.