| Discourse markers generally refer to a group of lexical expressions drawn from the classes of conjunctions, adverbials, prepositional phrases and other syntactic categories, which signal a relationship between the utterance they introduce and the preceding utterance. They are usually such words or structures as when taken away, do not affect the semantic meaning or propositional content of the utterances to which they are attached but do affect the pragmatic appropriateness. So they do not add to the true value of the discourse, and only have procedural meanings (Schourup, 1985). Being an important topic in the fields of semantics and pragmatics, a substantial body of research work has been done by researchers at home and abroad dealing with semantic and pragmatic aspects of discourse markers with different approaches: the coherence approach, the grammar approach, the relevance approach and the sociolinguistics approach. Among them, many scholars also have done such research in the field of second language education. However, the experimental study on discourse markers in second language education focuses mainly on the fields of reading and writing. Few studies have been done on the function of discourse markers in the listening process of second language learners.For a long time, language learners have been troubled by English listening, especially English news listening. As is known, English news listening counts more and more in listening, yet it has been a bottleneck both for the students to learn and for teachers to teach. Nowadays, college students have realized the difficulty in their news listening, especially the trouble in employing appropriate and effective skills in their news listening. Thus, the recent developments in the research into the field of news listening have led to renewed interest in the acquisition of effective news listening method. According to relevance theory, discourse markers can help the hearer reorient a context of assumptions to obtain the intended information by the speaker and guarantee the listener to search for the relevance between utterances and the contextual information by affording the least effort. Besides, they can guide the listener to predict the upcoming information and shorten the time of listening comprehension. Accordingly, a good command of employing and understanding discourse markers not only helps the listeners to understand the context smoothly but also helps them to achieve coherence in the discourse.Thus, this thesis firstly attempts to illustrate some functions of discourse markers based on relevance theory in news listening comprehension and carries out an investigation with a questionnaire and a test on discourse markers to have a learning of the status of students'news listening comprehension and their awareness of discourse markers in the process of news listening comprehension. Next, the author divided the objects into two groups including experimental group and controlled group. During the experimental period, the controlled group was not given any explanation of discourse markers during the listening course, while the experimental group received the instruction of discourse markers in their English listening class. At last, the data analysis of questionnaire and tests verifies the effects of discourse markers instruction in the course of news listening comprehension. The results of the survey have manifested that the discourse markers'instruction in news listening course indeed facilitate and improve students'news listening comprehension. It is hoped that the findings of the present study could arise teachers'realization of the necessity to integrate the instruction of discourse markers in their teaching of English news listening and also calls for the students'awareness of discourse markers during the process of news listening. |
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