functional analysis of frame markers in students' essays: across disciplinary study

Frame markers as one of the broad interactive subcategories; display the relationship between writer and reader. in the other words, they are defined as items to frame information about elements of discourse and functioning to sequence, label, predict and shift arguments, and to make the discourse clear to readers. how to make good use of frame markers becomes one of the focuses in english writing classes. thus, this study intends to investigate the frequency and functions of frame markers in students academic writing. to meet this end, argumentative and evaluative students’ essays from two disciplines of philosophy and psychology were selected from the university of michigan corpus of upper-level student papers (micusp) corpus. the results showed that the frame marker was frequent enough to be considered in teaching writing genres. the results also showed that frame markers represent an important way by which authors structure their discourse for particular readers, helping them to see the coherence of arguments and guiding their thinking in the direction the author wishes to go. disciplinary differences concerning frequencies, types and functions of the frame markers were reported. in addition, the results of this study could directly be used in the syllabus designed for writing academic genres.