Overuse of discourse markers in Turkish EFL learners’ writings: The case of I think and in my opinion

Abstract

This study tries to dwell on overuse of two discourse markers I think and in my opinion in Turkish EFL learners’ written productions. The data was collected from 161 Turkish EFL learners and a corpus of 58.046 words was compiled and it was compared with a native English corpus of 54.285. The focus of the comparison was the frequency of the phrases I think and in my opinion. A raw frequency calculation of the phrases revealed that the Turkish EFL learners actually used a considerable amount of them when compared with the written productions of native speakers of English. In the inferential analysis process, the variances of these phrases in the two corpora were calculated and since the calculations yielded statistically significant differences, a non-parametric test, Mann Whitney U-test, was employed. The results validated the obvious difference of the phrases in terms of frequency, which means that there is a plethora of the phrases of I think and in my opinion in Turkish EFL learners’ written productions.