A Corpus-Based Study on Chinese English Majors’ Use of Discourse Markers

Abstract

Discourse markers (DMs for short hereafter) are used widely by native speakers and L2 learners. Previous studies are mostly about the acquisition and application of DMs, but studies on the potential factors that might affect the use of DMs are rare. Under the Relevance Theory, the present corpus-based study aims to reveal the influence of gender and oral proficiency on the use of DMs by Chinese English majors. It found that: (1) generally speaking, the variety of DMs employed by Chinese learners of English is rather limited; (2) male Chinese learners of English use more DMs than female learners; (3) high proficiency Chinese learners of English employ more DMs than the low proficiency group; moreover, the variety of DMs used by the former group is much larger than that of the latter. These findings reveal that the learner factors of gender and oral proficiency do influence the use of DMs in L2 learners' conversations and they should be taken into consideration when we are learning or researching.

Discourse markers in EFL teacher talk

“…Posljednjih se godina tako pojavio niz istraživanja uporabe engleskih diskursnih oznaka kod neizvornih govornika različitih materinskih jezika, primjerice španjolskoga (Romero-Trillo, 2002), njemačkoga (Müller, 2005), francuskoga (Gilquin, 2008), hrvatskoga (Vickov, 2010a), turskoga (Aşik i Cephe, 2013) i perzijskoga (Nejadansari i Mohammadi, 2015). Samo neke od tema kojima se bave novija istraživanja neizvornih govornika (od kojih ćemo neka detaljnije opisati u poglavljima koja slijede) jesu uporaba diskursnih oznaka u pisanju (Vickov, 2010a), utjecaj prvoga jezika na uporabu diskursnih oznaka u stranomu jeziku (Liu, 2013), utjecaj diskursnih oznaka na tečnost govora (Sadeghi i Yarandi, 2014), utjecaj razine jezične vrsnosti na uporabu diskursnih oznaka (Neary-Sundquist, 2014), učinak eksplicitne pouke na usvajanje diskursnih oznaka (Rahimi i Riasati, 2012) i uporaba diskursnih oznaka u učionici (Ding, Wang i Ding, 2015;Nejadansari i Mohammadi, 2015).…”