Discourse markers and spoken English: Nonnative use in the Turkish EFL setting

This dissertation aims at identifying the discourse markers used by Turkish nonnative speakers of English, their occurences in their spoken English discourse by comparing them with the ones used in native speakers? spoken discourse and their use of functions. For these purposes, the study used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Within the quantitative side of the study, a research corpus was composed with the course presentations of the Turkish undergraduate students studying at Gazi University throughout transcription process. To compare the data, transcripts of student presentations from University of Michigan with the help of MICASE Corpus were also attained. The occurences of the discourse markers in both corpus were determined. The results show that Turkish nonnative speakers of English have a lack of variety in using discourse markers in their spoken English and use discourse markers in a limited number. As for the qualitative side of the study, the functions of the discourse markers were given examples from two corpus, which revealed that nonnative speakers do not benefit from the variety of functions of the discourse markers in spoken discourse. Along with these findings, the study highlights the importance of the need for awareness-raising of Turkish nonnative speakers in using discourse markers in their spoken English discourse and recommends considerable implications for English language teaching.