Marked Themes in WKU Student Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics-based Analysis

Abstract

This study looks at marked themes in WKU student writing. Two issues will be investigated in this paper: what are the most popular marked themes and which ones are overused and misused. Multiple case studies approach will be used to analyze the data, which are student writings in WKU according to optimism [5] and SFL theory [4] will be used for analysis. This study has found that the most popular marked theme in WKU is “however”, which is misused most frequently at the same time. This study provides a new perspective to observe academic writings in Sino-foreign universities in China. Linguistics studying ESL writings might be interested in this study.