A Comparative Study of Discourse Markers in Four Corners and ILI English Series

The current study aimed at comparing the use of discourse markers (DMs) in Four Corners(FCs) and The ILI English Series (ILI) as English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks developed by native and nonnative (Iranian) authors,respectively.To this end, the conversation sections of FCs 2 and ILI Elementary 3 (ILI E 3) were analyzed in terms of the types and functions of DMs and their frequencies based on functionalparadigm of DMs proposed by Fung and Carter (2007). The results ofchi-square analyses showed that the use of discourse markers was significantly different in both corpora. Moreover, the findings indicated that interpersonal followed by referential were the most frequent DMs applied in these books. However, no considerable difference was observed with regard to referential DMs. It is hoped that the findings can be beneficialfor EFL materials developers, teachers, and learners.