Contrastive Discourse Marker Usage in Native and Non-Native Undergraduate Academic Writing: A Corpus-Based Study
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Abstract
This preliminary corpus-based study investigated how native (NS) and non-native (NNS) undergraduate students use contrastive discourse markers (CDMs) in academic expository writing. Following Fraser's (1999) taxonomy, 120 essays (60 per group) from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, totaling 299,279 tokens, were analyzed using AntConc and log-likelihood statistical tests. Nine CDMs were examined: but, however, although, though, nevertheless, whereas, on the other hand, on the contrary, and even though.
Results revealed both similarities and differences in CDM usage patterns. While both groups demonstrated comparable use of basic markers such as but, however, and although, NNS writers significantly overused formal connectors, particularly on the other hand (LL = -40.88) and whereas (LL = -9.97). Positional analysis indicated that NNS writers showed a strong preference for sentence-initial placement (e.g., however at 70.2%), whereas NS writers employed more flexible positioning strategies throughout their texts.
These findings suggested that NNS writers rely heavily on formulaic and explicit contrastive structures, likely reflecting instructional influences and limited rhetorical flexibility. The study provides alternative insights for enhancing academic writing pedagogy in EFL contexts by highlighting the need for more contextually appropriate and varied CDM instruction.
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This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which allows others to share the article with proper attribution to the authors and prohibits commercial use or modification. For any other reuse or republication, permission from the journal and the authors is required.References
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