Teachers’ Discourse Marker In University English Classroom

Discourse markers (DMs) play an important part in the daily communication.Since the1970s, studies on DMs are becoming a heated topic with the growth oflinguistic. Due to the diverse focuses on DMs, there is no agreement on the definitionand terminology of DMs. But all the scholars admit the significance of DMs incommunication. More and more researchers have devoted themselves to the study onthe DMs and also made some achievements. They do the researches mainly from threeapproaches perspectives: the coherence-based approach, the grammatical-pragmaticapproach and the relevance-theoretical approach. This paper first has a briefintroduction to the basic concepts of DMs from different scholars, then analyzes thethree approaches respectively and also presents some concepts of the relevance theorywhich lay the foundation of the paper.There are a lot of researches on DMs at home and abroad as well as the researcheson students’ DMs, but the researches on teachers’ DMs are few. Therefore the paperexplores the teachers’ use of DMs in university English classroom. The teachers’ use ofDMs has an effect on the students’ understanding of DMs and discourse. Based on therelevance theory, the research questions are as follow: What DMs occur? Howfrequently do they occur? What’re the factors that influence teachers’ DMs? Whatteachers’ character closely related to the use of DMs? What is the phenomenon ofteachers’ DMs? Are DMs overused, underused, or misused? What DMs have negativeinfluence on students’ understanding?In order to answer the questions and to provide empirical evidence to the research,the four English teachers in a university in Chongqing are involved. They teachsophomores who are not English majors and their teaching processes are tape-recordedand then transcribed into written materials.From the analysis of teachers’ DMs in class, there are some findings: firstly, it isthe analysis of teachers’ DMs based on relevance theory; then there are some specificuses of DMs in teacher talk; the problems exist in the teachers’ DMs, such as overuse,misuse, lack of DMs in teacher talk and some factors will influence the teachers’ DMs. They are the teachers’ awareness of DMs, the amount of teacher talk and teachers’personal factors. Teachers who have the knowledge of DMs will pay attention to its use.And the more the teacher speaks, the more the DMs he will use. Some teachers’personal factors will also have an effect on the use of DMs. Female teachers use moreDMs than male. And younger teachers may use more DMs than the older. However, titleand teaching experience has little influence on the use of DMs in the paper.Lastly, some limitations and suggestions for future study are discussed in the lastchapter. Only four teachers are chosen in a university in Chongqing due to the practicaldifficulties in the study. The figure is too small to draw a strong conclusion on theteachers’ DMs in university English classroom. In future study the materials in a largescale are need to prove the results of this study.