The Use of Discourse Markers in Spanish Language Learners’ Written Compositions

The present paper reports on the use of discourse markers in short compositions written by Spanish language learners. The aim is to explore how frequently discourse markers appear in written productions of foreign language learners and to verify which kind of markers they mostly use. A learners’ corpus of approximately 26 500 words has been compiled for this study. By comparing the results of the language learners with the texts composed by a control group of Spanish native participants, we want to shed light on which types of discourse markers seem more or less evident to acquire and which problems learners seem to encounter in expressing discourse cohesion.