Philippine E-Journals

A Comparative Analysis of Discourse Markers on Excuse Letters

Adrien Jaie A. Fortaleza | Bob Jayson A. Labiao | Ma. Juliet G. Vasay

Discipline: Literature, English, Communication Arts

 

Abstract:

The researchers’ main purpose of this study was to find out the different discourse markers that college students used on their excuse letters. The researchers utilized the descriptive-qualitative method to describe and analyze the different discourse markers in the excuse letters. A comparative analysis was also utilized to reveal the male and female college students’ discourse markers on the collected excuse letters in a Catholic university. The corpora of this study are the excuse letters written by the third year Bachelor of Arts in English major in Language students enrolled in Sy 2017-2018. The excuse letters were supplied by the language teachers of the Liberal Arts Program which were gathered from June to August, 2017 and October 2017 to January 2018. Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written by male and female college students. It showed that the male and female students used the same discourse markers in their excuse letters. On the other hand, the results also revealed that gender affects the writer’s performance. In this case, the male college students used more discourse markers than the female college students. It was also observed that the male and female college students tend to be direct when writing excuse letters. Both students have also the tendency to not use contrastive markers in excuse letters since they mostly likely want to elaborate and add details and not contradict and offer contrasting ideas. Finally, it was observed that the female students are more polite and clear in the construction of their letters while male college writers are direct and guilty of some syntactical errors in their sentences