Since recent studies on academic English have shown considerable cross-cultural variation in texts written by non-native speakers (paper investigates a corpus of diploma theses written by Czech and German students of English with the aim of fi nding out how novice non-native writers from different discourse communities (Swales 2004) use causal and contrastive discourse markers (DMs) associated with hypotactic and paratactic relations in order to build coherence relations (Taboada 2006) in

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... oada 2006) in academic texts. In addition, the author attempts to fi nd out whether there is any variation in the preferences of novice writers depending on the different fi elds of study, i.e. diploma theses written in the areas of linguistics and methodology, and whether the use of selected DMs by Czech and German students differs from the writing habits of native speakers of English. Key words written academic discourse, diploma theses, discourse markers, causal and contrastive relations, hypotactic and paratactic relations