Transition markers in EAP textbooks

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate current EAP textbooks in terms of pedagogy of transition markers. Transition markers, e.g. moreover, therefore, are interactive metadiscourse devices which facilitate the reader’s understanding of the text (Hyland, 2005). Previous research shows that they pose a challenge to learners of academic English, who tend to overuse transition markers and misuse them both semantically and stylistically. Recommendations for teaching transition markers from the literature were used to evaluate 39 published EAP textbooks. The results show a rather low application of the principles identified, ranging from 0% to 59%, with an average of 21% (median 18%). The study has implications for EAP practitioners as well as materials writers. Most importantly, EAP teachers should supplement textbooks with authentic academic texts and possibly with concordance lines from corpora, explicitly discourage overuse of transition markers, teach syntactic distinctions between conjunctions and adverbials and raise stylistic awareness related to the use of transition markers in formal academic texts.