Markedness in Writing: A Case of EFL Students
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| Title | Markedness in Writing: A Case of EFL Students |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that which the clause is concerned (Halliday, 1994). One of the themes in Halliday’s (1994) model is marked theme in which there are some elements put in the theme position that frequently indicate notions such as validation of internal evidence; location in discourse time/space and writer viewpoint (Davies, 1989 as cited in Gosden, 1992). Such fronted elements, often at sentence boundaries, commonly have the function of textual organization by signaling changes and turns in real-world and discourse circumstances. This study made frequency and functional analysis of marked theme used in students’ composition writings. This study was carried out on the corpus of 180 compositions come from narrating three pictorial by sixty students- 20 sophomore, 20 junior, and 20 senior- majoring in Teaching English as Foreign Language. Students narrated these stories in three sessions of 45 minutes. The gathered data, 180 compositions, were analyzed in terms of marked theme based on Halliday’s (1994) model of thematic organization. The results illustrated significant differences between the three groups regarding their use of marked theme. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2012-04-01 |
| Source | Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol 2, No 4 (2012) |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |