The analysis of the DMs that are employed in expository essays might point to the fact that the use of these devices is affected by EFL learners’ proficiency levels. Lower proficiency EFL learners tend to use more restricted and redundant sets of DMs. Lower levels of proficiency might result in restricting the functions that are served by DMs, limiting the syntactic categories from which these markers are drawn and affecting the variety of the positions that they occupy.
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