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The Impact of Implicit Instruction upon the Use of English Discourse Markers in Written Tasks at the Advanced Beginners’ Level of EFL Proficiency

Paper · 2018 · Oleksandr Kapranov

Summary

The study asks whether implicit instruction, where learners meet language through tasks and input without overt attention to form, helps beginner EFL learners use English discourse markers (DMs) in writing. Nine adult, university-educated learners with Ukrainian as their L1 took an optional stand-alone course for advanced beginners. Each wrote a short descriptive text at the start of the semester (Task 1, "My Usual Day") and another at the end (Task 2, "My Unusual Day"). DM frequencies were counted with WordSmith and set against texts written by a control group. Implicit instruction brought no improvement. DM use fell between the two tasks, and some markers present in Task 1 were missing from Task 2. The learners' DM repertoire also looked narrow next to the controls'. The author concludes that DMs are hard for learners to notice and should be taught explicitly. The sample is very small, which the author acknowledges. He argues that such class sizes are typical of tertiary EFL teaching in Ukraine and the Baltic states.

Key points

  • Participants: 9 adult EFL learners at the advanced beginners' level, all with Ukrainian as L1, in an optional stand-alone course.
  • Design: longitudinal pre/post comparison of two written tasks on parallel topics, at the start and end of one semester ("My Usual Day" vs "My Unusual Day").
  • Method: quantitative, computer-assisted frequency counts of DMs using WordSmith (Scott, 2012), compared with control texts.
  • Result: overall DM use declined from Task 1 to Task 2, and the markers quite, so and still disappeared entirely.
  • Framing: the paper uses Fraser's definition of DMs (an S2-initial item signalling a relation between S1 and S2) and Fox Tree's typology (attitudinal, temporally sensitive, cohesive). Pragmatic competence follows Laughlin et al. (2015).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Testing the same writers on two parallel prompts at two points in time isolates change in a feature better than comparing different groups.
  • I2. Measuring repertoire (which marker types appear or vanish) and not only total frequency revealed a loss that raw counts would hide.
  • I3. Fraser's view of a DM as an S2-initial item linking two adjacent sentences gives a simple, positional definition that works for written text.
  • I4. Fox Tree's split of DMs into attitudinal, temporally sensitive (fillers) and cohesive classes ties marker type to register and spontaneity.
  • I5. Comparing learner texts against a control group's texts on the same task gives a baseline for judging whether a feature is underused.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Mova could be evaluated on matched prompt pairs before and after a training round, so that measured gains are not confounded with topic differences.
  • I2 (back): generated text could be checked for the inventory of connectives it uses, flagging outputs that collapse to a few markers like "and" or "then".
  • I3 (frames): crate prag could use sentence-initial DMs as explicit cues for discourse relations (contrast, consequence, addition) between neighbouring clauses' frames.
  • I4 (tokens): the tagger could assign DMs a functional class, so that fillers are kept out of the parse while cohesive markers are passed on as relation signals.
  • I5 (answer): answers or summaries produced by Mova's student readers could be compared with reference texts on the same item to detect missing discourse linking.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksDiscourse analysis · 394 worksGrammatical error correction & learner language · 80 works

Cite

Cite as Oleksandr Kapranov. 2018. The Impact of Implicit Instruction upon the Use of English Discourse Markers in Written Tasks at the Advanced Beginners’ Level of EFL Proficiency. Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture 8.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22364/bjellc.08.2018.04

@article{kapranov2018impact,
  title = {{The Impact of Implicit Instruction upon the Use of English Discourse Markers in Written Tasks at the Advanced Beginners’ Level of EFL Proficiency}},
  author = {Oleksandr Kapranov},
  journal = {Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture 8},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.22364/bjellc.08.2018.04},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22364/bjellc.08.2018.04}
}

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