Discourse Markers in Sports News: A Cross-cultural Study of Iranian and British Newspaper Articles

The purpose of this study was to investigate discourse markers in English newspapers articles in sports genre developed by Iranian and British newspaper articles written in English. The newspaper articles were an extract from Iran daily (Iranian) and Independent (British) newspapers. A corpus of 3,858 words from Iranian newspaper and 3,849 words from the English newspaper articles were selected. The news articles were published in the course of three weeks period in February and March 2016. The corpus was then coded based on Fraser’s (2006) taxonomy of discourse markers. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Results show that elaborative discourse markers were the most frequent used discourse markers in the two corpora of newspaper articles written by Iranian non-native speakers and native speakers in English. Results of chi-square analysis show that there was statistically significant difference in the use of contrastive discourse markers in the two corpora. Learners’ ability in employing proper discourse markers in writings can be a sign of progress in learning English and producing more cohesive texts. The findings are thus hoped to be useful for teachers and instructors in order to improving English language learners’ writings and help students to use discourse markers correctly and appropriately.