AKADEMİK YAZIDA SÖYLEM BELİRTEÇLERİ KULLANIMININ GELİŞTİRİLMESİ: DOĞRUDAN ÖĞRETİM VE DOLAYLI EDİNİM

Abstract

Cohesion has always been a major component of academic writing. One common problem with non-native student writers' academic writing is the lack of cohesion due to the inadequate and inappropriate use of discourse markers (DMs), which are the essential elements of cohesion. Studies (e.g. Granger, 1998; Li & Schmitt, 2009) have shown that since non-native student writers lack a deep and wide knowledge of DMs, they overuse a limited set of DMs which they know well. This, in turn, causes their writing feel non-native. Whether explicit instruction (EI) or incidental acquisition (IA) is more effective on DM acquisition has not been totally researched yet. This small scale experimental and exploratory study sets out to find out whether a combination of the two paves the way to effective acquisition and retention of DMs in six freshman English majors. Results indicate that a combination of EI and IA lead to significant enhancement in the quantity and variety of DM use but not in accuracy.

Keywords

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ENHANCING THE USE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN ACADEMIC WRITING: THE COMBINATION OF INCIDENTAL ACQUISITION AND EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION

Abstract

Akademik yazı alanında dilbilgisel doğruluk kadar akıcılık ve tutarlılık da her zaman önemli bir bileşen olagelmiştir. Ana dili İngilizce olmayan öğrencilerin yaşadıkları önemli bir problem, akıcılığın ve tutarlılığın önemli temellerinden var sayılan "söylem belirteçlerinin" (SB) yetersiz ve yanlış kullanımına bağlı olarak yazılarında akıcılık ve bütünlük eksikleri görülmesidir. Çalışmalar ana dili İngilizce olmayan öğrencilerin derin ve geniş bir SB bilgisine sahip olmadıklarını ve dolayısıyla özellikle iyi bildikleri sınırlı sayıdaki SB'leri yazılarında aşırı sıklıkla kullandıklarını göstermiştir. Bu da sonuç olarak yazılarının doğallığını engellemektedir. SB öğreniminde "doğrudan öğretim"in mi yoksa "dolaylı edinim"in mi daha etkili olduğu henüz tam olarak araştırılmamıştır. Bu küçük ölçekli deneysel ve betimleyici çalışma, altı İngilizce bölümü öğrencisine uygulanan bir karma "doğrudan öğretim" ve "dolaylı edinim" metodunun etkili bir SB edinimine yol açıp açmadığını araştırmaktadır. Sonuçlar, bu metodun SB kullanım sayısını ve çeşitliliğini istatistiksel olarak anlamlı bir şekilde artırırken doğru kullanımda anlamlı bir farka yol açmadığını göstermektedir.

Keywords

• söylem belirteçleri, akademik yazı, akıcılık, doğrudan öğretim, dolaylı edinim

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47. Corpus of Contemporary American English is a 425 million-word corpus freely available
48. online (Figure 1). It is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and
49. academic texts. The interface allows search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of
50. speech, or any combinations of these. Collocates (e.g. all nouns somewhere near faint, all adjectives
51. near woman, or all verbs near feelings), which gives good insight into the meaning and use of a word
52. can also be searched within a ten-word window. Comparison among genres is also possible. During
53. the study, the students entered the DMs in the search tool, marked the KWIC (key word in context)
54. button, selected the “academic” genre and produced 100 concordance lines for each target item. The
55. default number of collocates for each entry was four to each direction (before and after the target
56. word/phrase) and it was maintained. Each collocate was highlighted with a different color according to
57. its part of speech (as shown in Figure 2). To see from which source the concordance line was quoted and see the target entry in its expanded context, the students clicked on “ACAD” at the right beginning of the line. They, further, studied the DMs in a more expanded context derived from authentic texts.
58. Figure 1. Website for concordance studies
59. Figure 2. Concordance lines for the DM “with regard to”.