A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Discourse Markers By College English Teachers

Discourse markers are essential to the daily communication. As a common languagephenomenon, discourse markers mainly facilitate the understanding of an utterance or constraintthe comprehension of a discourse. It is able to point out the context, connect the discourse, andguide the hearer to understand the real intention of the discourse, looking for relevance. It canalso play a lead role and sign to understand the discourse from overall and local, thus restrict onunderstanding to the utterance in cognitive.Generally speaking, there are two major branches of the studies on how DMs work inlanguage since the1980’s: they are semantic-pragmatic studies and cognitive-pragmatic studies.Based on coherence theory and relevance theory, in this paper, we will explore the functions ofDMs at sentence and textual level from both perspectives. Within a coherence-based framework,discourse markers link the utterances they introduce with previous discourse units as cohesivedevices and so contribute to discourse coherence. However, within a relevance-theoreticalapproach, discourse markers not only link the utterances with a interpretation process, but alsoguide the interpretation properties of context and contextual effects.This study adopts two corpora: one is foreign university teachers’ teaching videos, thentranscript it into text documents, and build small corpus. The other one is built by my tutor YanTao who set it up for her doctoral thesis. The study marks off discourse markers manually andwith the help of concordance program “AntConc3.2.2w (Windows)2008”, and investigates theuse of discourse. With the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, conclusions areobtained in the final part, which is that the author of the thesis not only reveals the pedagogicalimplications of the research, and also points out some limitations of the research and also raisessome issues for future studies in the English classroom. The findings yielded in this researchsheds light on current pedagogy of English teaching in English classroom. Therefore, Englishteachers can have a better understanding helping learners with their problems, and thenaccordingly to employ proper strategies, thus to cultivate appropriate awareness of the role ofDMs in constructing spoken discourses and improve their language proficiency.