TIPO DE ESTUDIO.

In this quantitative section, I first provide an overview of so as a linguistic item. Table 4.2 shows an overview of the main functions of so and their corresponding abbreviations in this study. All the native speakers were found to use the discourse marker so whereas only 42 participants out of 50 did so. This means that there were eight participants in the SLC corpus who did not use a single so as a discourse marker (for more information about use of discourse marker so per each participant in SLC, see Appendix 11).

Table 4.2 Functions of so and their abbreviations

FUNCTION ABBREVIATION

So indicating a result Result

So marking main idea unit Main idea

So introducing a new sequence New seq.

So marking transition Transition

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Table 4.3 and Figure 4.1 show the distribution of the raw frequency of so, the non-discourse marker (non-DM) so, the discourse marker (DM) so and unclear instances in the two corpora. The non-discourse marker so is used more by the Saudi speakers than by NSs. However, when the instances of so as a discourse marker in the two corpora were analysed, it was found that there were 624 instances of use by NSs of English and 380 by Saudis. To test the significance of the frequency of so between the SLC and LOCNEC, log likelihood test has been performed. The test showed that the difference of the use of discourse marker so in the two corpora was statistically significant at p <0.0001. The discourse marker so was used almost twice as often by the NSs as by the Saudi NNSs. There were 42 instances of unclear instances in the native speaker data compared to 31 instances in the Saudi data.

Table 4.3 Numbers of tokens of so in the SLC and LOCNEC (frequencies per 10,000 words in parentheses)

Total frequency Non-DM use DM use Unclear SLC (68,100 words) 662 (91.3) 211 (31) 380 (55.8) 31 (4.5) LOCNEC (68,000 words) 845 (124.2) 180 (26.4) 624 (91.7) 42 (6)

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Regarding the discourse marker functions of so, from Table 4.4 and Figure 4.2, it can be observed that the most frequent discourse marker function used by both NSs and Saudis was

so indicating a result, with the NSs employing it more frequently than the Saudis. Saudi speakers used so indicating result 180 times or 25 times per 10,000 words, whereas the NSs used it 241 times or 35 times per 10,000 words. Such normalised frequency was used to provide an accountable measure of relative frequencies which can be replicated and therefore allows valid cross-corpora comparisons to be carried out (Pichler, 2010). Frequency in this study was obtained by dividing the total number of tokens of discourse markers by the total number of words of the corpus then this number was multiplied by 10,000. So marking the main idea unit was the second most frequent function employed by the NSs although not by the Saudis. The former used it almost two and a half times more than Saudi speakers (143 tokens, or 21 times per 10,000 words versus 56 tokens, eight times per 10,000 words). NSs of English used so marking transition 108 times, or 16 times per 10,000 words while Saudis only used so with this function 26.4 times, or four times per 10,000 words. These last three functions achieved high statistical significance (p <0.001). NSs used so to introduce a new sequence five times more than Saudis with 127 tokens versus 122. The function which occurred the least was so introducing a turn; there were only three tokens in both corpora.

Table 4.4 Functions of so in the SLC and LOCNEC (frequencies per 10,000 words in parentheses)

Result Main Idea Transition New Seq. Introductory SLC (68,100 words) 180 (26.4) 56 (8.2) 25 (4) 122 (17.9) 1 (0.14) LOCNEC(68,000 words) 241 (35.4) 143 (21) 108 (15.8) 127 (18.6) 2 (0.29)

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Figure 4.2 Distribution of discourse marker functions of so – SLC versus LOCNEC

Regarding gender in the SLC corpus, as Table 4.5 shows, the males were found to use so

more than the females, with 334 versus 288 tokens. In addition, the males used the discourse marker so more than the females. However, no function was found to reach statistical significance. Figure 4.3 represents this graphically.

Table 4.5 Number of tokens of so in the SLC according to gender (frequencies per 10,000 words in parentheses)

Total frequency Non-DM use DM use Unclear Male (37,108 words) 334 (90) 104 (28) 204 (55) 21 (5.6) Female (30,900 words) 288 (93) 107 (34.6) 171 (55) 10 (3)

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Figure 4.3 Distribution of the linguistic item so in the SLC according to gender

In terms of the functions of the discourse marker so, we can see that the use by the two genders is almost exactly the same for each function (Table 4.6). None of the differences is statistically significant. However, because this is the first study ever to include spoken data from Saudi females and males are segregated from females in the Saudi education system, this comparison needs to be better established.

Table 4.6 Functions of so in SLC according to gender (frequencies per 10,000 words in parentheses)

Result Main Idea New Seq. Transition Introductory Male

(37,108 words) 91 (24.5) 34 (9) 70 (19) 13 (3.5) 1 (0.26) Female

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Figure 4.4 Distribution of discourse marker functions of so in the SLC according to gender

Further analysis of the quantitative results points to another conclusion. By counting down the number of discourse markers uses of so per speaker in both corpora, it can be observed that there are some results which require questioning. In LOCNEC, it was found that the use of the discourse marker so ranged from the maximum of 42 tokens by one speaker to a minimum of eight tokens by another speaker. On the other hand, in the SLC data, the analysis revealed that there was one speaker who used so as a discourse marker 43 times, which is almost similar to the NS data in LOCNEC. However, there were two speakers who used so

only once, five speakers who used so twice and four speakers who used it three times. This gives a total of 10 speakers out of 42 from the SLC corpus who used so with very low frequency.

What led to this observation was the distribution of frequency of using so in the native speaker data as a reference. NSs were all found to use so as a non-discourse marker and as a discourse marker. In fact, eight Saudi participants did not use any discourse marker function

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of so at all. Therefore, the discrepancy between the highest and the lowest frequency in the SLC data raises some concerns regarding the mastery of the use of so and familiarity with its functions among Saudi speakers (six Saudi speakers used so as a linguistic item). This suggests the need to investigate the textbooks which all these participants studied to compare what is found in their authentic discourse – the spoken corpus – to what they have been exposed to/taught.