English Writing Skill in Terms of Discourse Markers in INTERPOL Electronic Messages Written by Non-Native and Native Police Officers: A Comparative and Contrastive Study

Abstract

Discourse markers as connective words play an important role in communication. This study tried to contrastively and descriptively evaluate discourse markers’ implementation in INTERPOL electronic messages written by non-native (Iranian) and native English speaking police officers. A corpus of sixty corresponded messages through INTERPOL channel was chosen and all discourse markers in sixty messages were counted and classified according to Fraser`s (2006) taxonomy. The results were analyzed by SPSS software (version 21.0) using chi-square formula. The findings confirmed that there are no noticeable differences in categories of Fraser’s taxonomy of discourse markers between the Iranian non-native and native English speaking police officers apart from inferential discourse markers that are employed more frequently by non-natives than natives. It can be concluded that contrastive, elaborative, and temporal discourse markers are utilized similarly in compared texts, whereas inferential discourse markers’ implementation is statistically different.