A Study Of The Effect Of Discourse Markers On The Listening Comprehension Of Chinese College Students

Discourse markers (DMs) have been studied since the1970s by scholars fromvarious perspectives, such as Schiffrin and Fraser from the coherence-based view,Sperber and Wilson, and Blakemore from the relevance-based view. However, theexperimental researches of DMs in listening comprehension were conducted much lesscompared with those in reading, writing or speaking. A few scholars studied the effectof DMs in listening based on the lecture comprehension. Except the study ofFlowerdew and Tauroza, other experiments did not cover the Chinese college studentsas the subjects.To find out the effect of DMs in listening comprehension of Chinese collegestudents, this thesis firstly illustrates the functions of DMs based upon the RelevanceTheory. An experiment is carried out with a questionnaire and a free-recall task of twopassages.100Chinese college students participated in the investigation and weredivided into two groups according to their listening proficiency. The information in thelistening materials was divided into high-level information and low-level information.The results of the questionnaire indicate that the awareness of DMs in listeningcomprehension of both proficiency groups is at a relatively low level compared withtheir awareness of DMs in reading, writing and speaking. The data collected from thefree-recall tasks were analyzed with SPSS (version18.0). The results prove that DMshave affected the high-proficiency and low-proficiency learners’ recalling of theinformation units at different levels: high-level, low-level and combined informationunits. In the end, the implications derived from the major findings provide suggestionsfor listening studies. Students’ awareness of DMs in listening comprehension shouldbe raised and they could use note-taking as the method to improve their awareness ofDMs in listening comprehension.