Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
There are words and phrases in English,as well as in most languages,that indicate the relationship between an utterance and the prior discourse (Levinson, 1983). These words and phrases are referred to as discourse markers (henceforth DMs), including well,OK/okay,you know, etc.Possessing grammatical functions, DMs also work as effective interactional features,especially in spoken conversation (Schiffrin, 1987; Maschler, 1998; Fraser, 1999). Thus, DMs are considered to be of much importance in understanding discourse. The researches concerning discourse markers started in the 1970s. The topic has been studied by many scholars at different levels. The first and the most detailed study about DMs was conducted in 1980s by Schiffrin.She(1987:31)defines DMs as ‘sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk’. Furtherinfluential studies are conducted by Redeker (1991), Fraser (1990, 1996, 1999), and Blakemore (1992) from different perspectives. Researches on DMs can also be found at home.He and Ran (1999) analyses the cognitiveexplanationand pragmatic constraint of discourse connectors on utterance generation andunderstanding, whose contributions to DMs range from the theoretical aspects to case study.Other studies conducted by Chinese scholars, such as Chen (2002), He & Mo (2002),Ran (2002), Feng (2008) and so on, provide valuable insights into DMs as well.
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1.2 Significance of the study
Study on the teachers’use of discourse markers in college English-major classroom has both academic significance and practical significance.Firstly, the study on teachers’ use of discourse markers in college English-major classroom is an empirical case for the research of discourse markers in pedagogic settings, thus it will offer pertinent data for the development and advancement of this filed. Secondly, the study on teachers’ use of discourse markers in college English-major classroom will contribute to the studies and researches of second language acquisition.Teacher talk is significantly related to students’language input, thus the investigation of discourse markers in pedagogic setting will provide a referential material for the study of second language acquisition. First of all, the study is conducted to investigate English-major teachers’ current usage of discourse markers in Xinjiang Normal University. Thus, the present study attempts to help English-major teachers enhance the awareness of using correct discourse markers in the class. Secondly, Teacher talk is considered as one of the most important recourse of English input for English-major students. Teachers will adjust their instructional languagefor the benefit of students and also the lesson plans. Thus, the correct use of discourse markers by teachers will be gradually acquired by students, and in this way, students’ learning would be improved because of a better understanding of their teachers. In addition, the study tries to provide certain pedagogical implications for the use of discourse markers in classroom discourse in order to draw attention to the importance of the knowledge of discourse markers in professional foreign language teaching and learning.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter is mainly about the conceptual framework and literature review related to the present study. Concepts of discourse markers and teacher talk are introduced in the first part. Theoretical base of this study is talked about in the following section. Then, previous studies on discourse markers in western countries and also in China are presented. The Last part is to explain the limitation of previous studies in order to find research gap.
2.1 Conceptual framework
The diversity of terminologies indicates the different roles of DMs, and there are sentence connectives (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), clue words (Reichman, 1978), semantic connectives (van Dijk, 1979), pragmatic particles (?stman, 1982), pragmatic connectives (van Dijk, 1979; Stubbs, 1983), discourse particles (Schourup, 1985), pragmatic devices (Vande Kopple, 1985), semantic conjuncts (Quirk et al., 1985), pragmatic formatives (Fraser, 1987), utterance particles (Luke, 1987), pragmatic markers (Schiffrin, 1987), discourse operators (Redeker, 1991), cue phrases (Hovy, 1994; Knott & Dale, 1994), cue words (Rouchota, 1996), discourse markers (Hansen, 1998; Jucker & Ziv, 1998; Blakemore, 2002), etc. ?stman (1982:149) defines ‘pragmatic particles’ as being ‘(a) short, and (b) prosodically subordinated to another word. It would (c) resist clear lexical specification and be propositionally empty. Furthermore, it would (d) tend to occur in some sense cut off from, or on a higher level than the rest of the utterance, at the same time as it tends to modify the utterance as a whole’. Levinson (1983) thinks ofdiscourse markers, existing in most languages, as signals to represent the connection between an utterance and its preceding discourse, such as utterance-initial usages of but, therefore, inconclusion, to the contrary, still, however, anyway, well, and so on.
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2.2 Theoretical base
Interaction Hypothesis was proposed by Long in early 1980s based on the Krashen’s Input Hypothesis. Just like Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, the interaction hypothesis also takes account of the importance of comprehensible input, attempting to provide explanation about how acquisition occurs and to find out which kinds of interaction will best promote acquisition. According to Long (1983), there are three ways to make input comprehensible:(a) by means of input simplification (input features), (b) through the use of linguistic and extra-linguistic context, and (c) through modification of the interactional structure of conversation (interactional features, which consist of clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, etc.). When misunderstanding takes place in the interaction, students have to try modify their input by a process known as negotiation of meaning (Ellis, 1999). Long (1983) distinguished two kinds of negotiation: the negotiation aimed at avoiding conversational trouble and the one aimed at repairing discourse when trouble occurs. Interactional modifications belonging to the formerindicatelong-term planning for conversation, which is called strategies, while interactional modifications deriving from the second one are supposed to be spontaneous and mainly affect how topics are talked about, which is called tactics.
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Chapter Three Research Methods ....... 20
3.1 Research aims ...... 20
3.2 Research questions ...... 20
3.3 Research subjects ........ 21
3.4 Research instruments ......... 22
3.5 Data collection ..... 24
3.6 Data analysis procedures .... 24
Chapter Four Results and Discussion .......... 26
4.1 General descriptions of the DMs used by English-major teachers ......... 26
4.2 Frequently used DMs in English-major teachers’ discourses ......... 27
4.3 DMs’ usage of English-major teachers compared with MICASE .......... 28
4.4 Functions of OK/okay employed by English-major teachers ........... 36
Chapter Five Conclusion ....... 50
5.1 Main findings ....... 50
5.2 Implications ......... 53
5.3 Limitations ........... 54
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
In this chapter, the data collected for the thesis are discussed. The researchis carried out by transcripts of audio recordings from English-major teachers (NNS) and classroom observations, aiming to provide holistic answers of the research questions. Quantitative analysis will be presented to find out what DMs are frequently used by English-major teachers in terms of distribution and percentage, and then a comparison between English-major teachers’ data and native-speakers’ data will be made to address certain problems existing in English-major teachers’ discourses. Then a detailed analysis will be conducted to give further explanations of how teachers use the DM OK/Okay.
4.1 General descriptions of the DMs usedby English-majorteachers
General information of English-major teachers’ corpus in the present study is stated in table 4-1. Word types and word tokens are included in the table. Then, DMs appearing in NNS transcripts are locatedand then counted by Ant Concin terms of their types and frequencies, and then checked carefully at least three times by the author to control the accuracy of the data, as shown in table 4-2. There are 35 types of words or phrasescounted in this study as frequently used DMs by English-major teachers. The occurrences of DMs appeared in English-major teachers’ discourses is 5,467 times.
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Conclusion
The present study focuses on the analysis of discourse markers used by four English-major teachers in Xinjiang Normal University. DMs appearing in pedagogic settings can be perceived as important strategies for the teacher to deliver lectures and also as signals for students to locate information in teacher talk in order to assist learning and understanding. However, there are few researches dedicate to find out the DMs used by English-major teachers who themselves are EFL language users and whose English proficiency is regarded significant to specialised English learners in Chinese context. Thus the study provides a survey on the current situation of DMs used by non-native-speaking English-major teachers and then focus on a special DM OK/okay. In order to locate the DMs that are frequently adopted by English-major teachers, the study used Ant Conc to analyse the transcripts. And the datafrom non-native-speaking teachers’ corpusreveal that OK/okay(1,025 times), and (924 times), so(757 times), right (469 times), yeah (429 times), yes (349 times), or (262 times), but (244 times), alright (188 times), now (140 times), because/cuz (112 times), are frequently used in English-major teachers’ classrooms. Thereinto, OK/okay (1,025 times, 2.33 per cent), and (924 times, 2.10 per cent), so (757 times, 1.72 per cent) being the top three DMs. Whereas kindof (4 times), like (4 times), whatabout (4 tims), second/secondly(3 times), exactly (1 time), and yet (1 time) are the least frequently used DMs by English-major teachers.
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Reference documents (omitted)