A Contrastive Study on Transitional Markers in English Language Teaching Research Articles Written by English and Persian Academic Writers

The present study attempted to work on the distributions of the Transitional Markers in a corpus of thirty articles related to the discipline of English Language Teaching. All of the articles are written in English, fifteen by academic writers who are native speakers of English and the other fifteen by Persian academic writers. Using descriptive statistics, it was revealed that the Transitional Markers belonging to the categories of contrast and purpose were more used by native writers and Transitional Markers belonging to the category of comparison & similarity were used almost equally by both groups of writers. Transitional Markers belonging to the categories of addition, time, result, place, example and summary & emphasis were more used in the ELT articles written by Persian article writers. Moreover, using inferential statistics, it was indicated that a significant difference exist between the uses of the Transitional Markers in the two groups of the articles. Index Terms--metadiscourse, transitional markers, native academic writers, Persian academic writers, ELT research articles