The present study explores and compares the use of discourse markers by North American students and by Indonesian students of Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia in their academic oral English presentations, using corpus methodology and the Log-likelihood test. The North American students‘ presentations are extracted from MICASE online corpus. The results indicate that the use of DMs by the North American
students under investigation shares both similarities and differences with that by the Indonesian students in terms of varieties of DMs found, the functions, and the frequency
distributions. The North American students and the Indonesian students use Micromarkers in a similar fashion. Contrariwise, the uses of Macro-markers, Operators 1: Speaker-speech, and Operators 2: Speaker-hearer in the Indonesian students‘ speech are relatively different from those in the North American students‘ speech. The study therefore contributes the suggestions to the English teaching and learning process for
they are evidently proven to occur frequently as well as play a pivotal role in native English speakers‘ speech. |