2 authors: Eman Awni Ali University of Jordan 7

From my point of view, I suggest that the academic and administrative staff take course from time to time for enhancing their behavior. (Advanced)

University life includes some unavoidable problems that students might face. Actually, it is part of the human life that people encounter some problems. (Advanced)

It should be pointed out, however, that the majority of the spoken markers that were employed in the essays served the function of marking the attitude of the participants towards the propositional contents of the sentences that host them. As mentioned previously, the participants in the study were asked to write expository essays in which they express their opinions on problems they face at their university. Writing essays that express personal opinions might require the use of DMs that signal the participants ‘opinions and might account for the occurrences of the spoken markers that perform this function.

2. 
   Syntactic categories
   

The DMs that are analyzed in the present study are drawn from seven syntactic categories, namely, coordinate conjunctions, subordinate conjunctions, prepositions, prepositional phrases, adverbials, clauses and interjections.

Table 8 presents the frequency of the syntactic categories of the DMs that are employed in the subjects’ expository essays. As shown in Table 8, the syntactic category of coordinate conjunctions (42.3%) was the most frequent source of DMs in the present study, followed by adverbials (23.0%), subordinate conjunctions (16.3%), prepositional phrases (12.4%), clauses (4.1%) then prepositions (0.9%) and interjections (0.9%). Discourse markers which are drawn from the coordinate conjunctions (but, and, or) had a higher percentage of use in the intermediate learners’ data. The intermediate learners’ extreme over-reliance on the elaborative marker ‘and’ and the contrastive marker ‘but’ might account for the fact that coordinate conjunctions constituted a ratio of (54.7%) of the entire set of the syntactic categories that were employed by these learners. Djigunović and Vikov (2011, p.273) attribute the over-reliance on these markers to the fact that they “are very simple in their orthographic and phonological structure, and are semantically unambiguous, which makes them easy to both acquire and use.”

The advanced learners (16.1%) and the intermediate learners (16.5%) had comparable percentages of DMs which are drawn from subordinate conjunctions. A deeper analysis indicates that the intermediate learners relied heavily on (so and because) to represent this syntactic category of DMs. The advanced learners, on the other hand, employed a more varied set of the DMs that are dawn from subordinate conjunctions (e.g. although, even though, while, since).
The DMs that belong to the adverbial category were used more frequently by the advanced learners. Temporal markers (e.g. first, eventually and finally) are drawn from this category and they had a higher percentage of use in the advanced learners’ essays. In addition to the temporal markers, the advanced learners employed other markers that belong to the adverbial category more frequently than the intermediate learners (e.g. consequently, still, therefore, moreover, nonetheless and however).
Moreover, the syntactic categories of prepositions and prepositional phrases had a higher ratio of use by the advanced EFL learners. The advanced learners used more frequently a varied set of DMs that belong to these categories (e.g. for example, despite, instead of, in addition to, in other words and in conclusion). Finally, interjections and clauses are the sources of the majority of spoken markers (e.g. Oh and I think). In accordance with the fact that spoken markers were used more frequently by the intermediate learners, the syntactic categories that are the sources of these markers had a higher percentage of use in the intermediate learners’ data.

2. 
   Sentence position
   

Discourse markers may appear sentence initially, medially or finally. Nonetheless, there were no instances of DMs that occur in sentence-final position in the EFL learners’ data. The positions that DMs occupied in essays written by the intermediate and advanced EFL learners are presented in Table 9.
The frequent employment of DMs in sentence-medial position by the intermediate and the advanced learners contradicts Schourup (1999), Fraser (1999), Fung (2003) and Muller (2005) who argue that DMs tend typically to occur in sentence-initial position. The tendency of DMs to appear initially is attributed to the fact that DMs serve the function of guiding readers towards eliciting the intended connections between discourse segments early before the possibility of misinterpreting these connections (Schourup 1999: 233).
The analysis also reveals that the intermediate learners (71.1%) employed DMs in sentence-medial position more frequently than the advanced learners (59.9%). This might stem from the fact that the intermediate learners overused the DMs that are drawn from coordinate conjunctions. The DMs that belong to this syntactic category (and, but, or) tend to appear sentence-medially. The advanced learners, on the other hand, employed the syntactic categories of adverbials and propositional phrases as sources of DMs more frequently than the intermediate learners. The DMs that are drawn from these categories tend to occupy sentence-initial position. Table 10 presents the association between the positions that DMs occupy in sentences and the syntactic categories from which these pragmatic expressions are drawn.
Moreover, the tendency of the intermediate learners to employ DMs in sentence-medial position more frequently than the advanced learners might also stem from the fact that the former had a higher percentage of elaborative markers than the latter. In contrast to the Elaborative markers that tend to appear more frequently in sentence- medial position, temporal markers had a higher ratio of use in sentence-initial position. The temporal markers were employed more frequently by the advanced learners who had a higher ratio of using DMs in initial position than the intermediate learners. Table 11 presents the association between the sentence positions and the functional categories of DMs.

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