2 authors: Eman Awni Ali University of Jordan 7

Result and discussion

5.1 Frequency of occurrence
A total of 853 DMs were used by the intermediate and advanced EFL learners. The intermediate learners employed 419 DMs in their expository writing and the advanced learners employed 434. One DM was observed to be roughly used by both groups of learners every 13 words (The frequency rate is calculated by dividing the total number of words on the number of DMs used by each group of learners). The frequency of DM occurrences is presented in Table 1.
As apparent from Table 1, there was no marked difference in the frequency between the advanced and the intermediate learners of English. The number of DMs used by the advanced learners accounted for 50.9% of the identified instances. As for the intermediate learners, the percentage of frequency accounted for 49.1%.

2. 
   Functions
   

The second criterion used in judging the participants’ use of DMs is the functions that these pragmatic expressions serve in expository essays. The frequencies of the functional classes of the DMs that are employed by the advanced and intermediate EFL learners are presented in Table 2.
As shown in Table.2, elaborative markers were the most frequently employed (47.1%), followed by inferential markers (17.8%), temporal markers (12.9%), contrastive markers (11.1%) and spoken markers (11.0%). The extensive use of elaborative markers by the advanced and intermediate EFL learners might be contributed to the fact that expository writing typically requires elaboration of ideas which might be signaled by the use of the elaborative category of DMs (Martinez, 2004; Jalilifar, 2008; Asassfeh, et al., 2013). However, it should be pointed out that the intermediate learners (53.9%) used elaborative markers more frequently than the advanced ones (40.6%). Jalilifar (2008, p.116), who reported a similar result, observes that there is “a negative relationship between increase of composition writing ability and the use of elaborative DMs.”

In other words, as students became more proficient in their ability to write in English, “the rate of DMs other than elaborative markers increased, but elaborative markers decreased” (Jalilifar, 2008, p.116). This assumption might be verified by the fact that the temporal, inferential and contrastive markers were used more frequently by the advanced EFL learners.

Spoken markers had a slightly higher percentage of use in essays written by the intermediate (12.4%) rather than advanced learners (9.7%). This finding is supported by Šimčikaitė (2012) and might be justified by the assumption that lower English-language proficiency students are less familiar with the stylistic peculiarities of DMs. Contrastive markers were the least employed functional class of DMs in the intermediate learners’ essays. A similar result is reported by Asassfeh, et al., (2013), hence, it could be argued that the contrastive class of DMs is the most difficult to learn by intermediate EFL learners.

2. 
   Variety of use
   

In order to investigate whether the subjects used varied or restricted sets of DMs, instances of the targeted DMs are categorized under the five functional classes that are analyzed in the present study. This section presents a qualitative analysis of the variety of use of the DMs that are grouped under elaborative, temporal, inferential, contrastive and spoken classes of DMs.

1. 
   The variety of elaborative markers
   

As mentioned previously, elaborative markers were the most frequently employed class of DMs by the advanced and intermediate EFL learners. The occurrences of DMs that are categorized under this class are presented in Table 3.
The results indicate that the intermediate and advanced EFL learners overused the DM ‘and’. The over-reliance on ‘and’ is indicated by Asassfeh, et al., (2013) who found that this marker constituted a ratio of 80% of the elaborative DMs which are employed in the essays that he analyzed. In the present study, the intermediate learners showed a greater tendency to overuse the DM ‘and’ in comparison to the advanced ones. Accordingly, this maker constituted a ratio of 89.8% of the entire set of the elaborative markers that were used in the intermediate learners’ essays as opposed to 62.5% employed in essays written by the advanced learners. . Example (1) illustrates the redundant use of ‘and’ by the intermediate learners.

1. 
   The first problem is the students don’t have a long time when we want registration. And the faculties very far take a long time to come to the class, and we don’t have a place to put the books between the classes and we don’t have box to put my things. (Intermediate)
   

In addition to ‘and’, the only DM that was used more frequently by the intermediate learners was ‘or’. The DMs (also, as well as, for example, moreover, furthermore, in addition to, besides and in other words) were used more frequently by the advanced learners. Moreover, there were no instances of the DMs (furthermore, in other words, besides, and as well as) in the intermediate learners’ expository writing. Examples (2-3) include instances of the use of elaborative markers in the advanced learners’ essays.

2. 
   Second, many students suffer from the large distance between classes, in other words, students spend a lot of time wondering around from one place to another to take their different classes. (Advanced)
   
3.