Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

This study examined what discourse markers (DM) and their characteristics are in English. It described the range of uses of English discourse markers in conversations included in Interchange books. It also determined the most frequently used discourse markers. It was found that "oh" and "well" were the most frequently used discourse markers in the conversations, and then the functions of them w...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

This paper explores several aspects together for a fine-grained Chinese discourse analysis. We deal with the issues of ambiguous discourse markers, ambiguous marker linkings, and more than one discourse marker. A universal feature representation is proposed. The pair-once postulation, cross-discourse-unit-first rule and word-pair-marker-first rule select a set of discourse markers from ambiguou...