Nor Ashikin Ab Manan

Explicit Discourse Marker Instruction to Improve Coherence and Cohesion in Academic Writing

This quasi- experimental study examined the effects of explicit discourse marker (DM) instruction on ESL learners’ academic writing performance. Two intact groups of pre-degree students enrolled in an academic writing class at a public university were involved in the study. One group was assigned as the experimental group and the other was assigned as the control group. Both groups went through similar academic writing instruction employing the process-writing approach. However, the experimental group was also subjected to intensive instruction on the use of DMs. The study hopes to address the following research questions. RQ1: What are the effects of DM instruction on the subjects’ use of discourse markers in their Academic Essay Test (AET)? RQ2: What are the effects of DM instruction on the subjects’ AET scores for the three writing sections; ‘content’, ‘language’ and ‘organization’? It can be concluded that explicit teaching of DMs is beneficial in encouraging the use of DMs in the subjects’ academic essays. The experimental group was found to perform significantly better than the control group in the post AET. DM instruction does not only improve the ‘organization’ section of the essay but also the ‘language’ and ‘content’ sections as well. The effect size of the treatment on the post AET is medium in relation to ‘organization’ but large for ‘content’ and ‘language’.

Mother Tongue Interference in the Writing of English as a Second Language (ESL) Malay Learners

The objective of this study is to identify the errors in writing committed by Malay ESL learners which can be attributed to mother tongue interference. Twenty pre-degree quantity surveyor students from Universiti Teknologi MARA Perak campus participated in the study. They were instructed to write between 200- to 300-word essays on a given topic in English and in Malay. Their compositions were analyzed using the algorithm for conducting error analysis (EA) proposed by James (1998) which are practiced by current EA practitioners. Since the main focus of the study is mother tongue interference, only errors related to L1 interference were addressed. The paper presents and discusses the descriptive analysis of the results in relation to three major types of interference which are ‘transfer of rules’, ‘redundancy reduction’ and ‘overgeneralization’.