Using English Discourse Markers: A Comparison of Persian and English Dentistry Authors

With regard to the role of discourse markers as key elements in creating any coherent and natural piece of languages, the present study aimed at investigating the implementation of English discourse makers in academic papers written by Persian and English dentistry researchers. To this end, 20 papers by Persian authors and 20 by English-speaking authors were selected and analyzed line by line. The findings revealed that discourse markers were more frequent in papers produced by English-speaking researchers. However, the papers in both groups contained almost an equal range of discourse markers. In addition, distribution of discourse markers among different sections of papers and under different sub-classes of discourse markers was almost similar in the two groups. Despite similarities in the implementation of discourse markers between papers produced by Persian and English researchers, the papers written by Persian authors still lacked coherence; this could be attributed to the underuse and misuse of discourse markers in these papers and the fact that discourse markers are not the only elements that make a text coherent