A Study Of Discourse Markers Used By Senior High School In An Open Class Based On Corpus

With the continuous development of linguistics,the study of discourse markers arouses many scholars’ interests both at home and aboard since 1970 s.Among those scholars,some of them have achieved a fruitful research results.Their studies on discourse markers were mainly based on three major perspectives,that is,syntactic-pragmatic,semantic-pragmatic and cognitive-pragmatic.With more in-depth and extensive study on discourse markers,more and more scholars have begun to explore the role of discourse markers in English classroom,which provides a new research field for them.Teaching discourses are the soul of the English classes,and teachers’ discourse markers are an important component of teaching discourses.At present,teachers are still the main source of the English language input for students,therefore it is important to improve their teaching discourses’ quality.One way is to improve the quality of their use of discourse markers in English class,because teachers’ use of discourse markers not only helps students understand teachers’ talks better,but also influences students’ cognition and the use of discourse markers as well as helping students to improve their ability to use English comprehensively.What is the number,distribution,type and frequency of classroom discourse markers used by high school English teachers? What discourse markers are often used by teachers in the class? What are the characteristics of discourse markers used by senior high school English teachers,including the use of three kinds of discourse markers? Is there any difference between the novice English teachers and experienced teachers on the use of discourse markers? And in what aspects? What are the pragmatic functions of discourse markers that are most frequently used by high school English teachers? Is there any inappropriate use of discourse markers among senior high school English teachers,such as the overuse of discourse markers,the misuse of discourse markers and the lack of the use of the discourse markers as well as lack of diversity? Those above-mentioned questions will bestudied in this paper.This paper mainly takes ten national high school English teachers as the research object,and the author builds a small closed corpus based the collection of the corpus from the ten teachers’ classroom video of "the tenth national session of high school English class teaching".And the author used Ant Conc3.3.4w software to collect the data of the 17 discourse markers used by teachers in the classroom.The qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to analyze discourse markers used by teachers in the class.The research results are as follows:Firstly,the discourse markers used by the national senior high school English teachers are lack of diversity,mainly focused on the three most frequently used discourse markers,namely,ok,and and so.Meanwhile,discourse markers include then,yeah,you know,all right,and,so,ok,but are frequently used by teachers in the class.Secondly,according to the classification rule of monosyllabic,polysyllabic and phrase,the author divides the discourse markers into three categories: simple discourse markers,complex discourse markers and phrases.Teachers use discourse markers show certain characteristics.The results found that they used simple discourse markers the most,that is,monosyllabic words.Thirdly,the author analyses the pragmatic functions of and,so and ok,which are most frequently used by the national senior high school English teachers in the tenth open class,such as shifting the conversational topic,turning-taking,and the function of the construction of discourse,which can help teachers to organize classroom activities better,make the transition of teaching processes more fluently and realize the teaching contents and so on.Students can also understand the intentions of teachers’ discourse better.Fourthly,inappropriate use of discourse markers exists among the national senior high school English teachers,including the overuse of discourse markers,the misuse of discourse markers and the lack of the use of the discourse markers.According to the relevance theory,the discourse markers can achieve different pragmatic functions in different contexts.Students can understand the teachers’ words better and use the least effort to achieve the maximum contextual effect through the process of inferring.These inappropriate use phenomena will cause difficulties for students to understand teachers’ words.Fifthly,Compared to the novice teachers,experienced English teachers using discourse markers are more reasonable in quantity,frequency and type than the novice teachers usingdiscourse markers,but the number of complex discourse markers used by the novice teachers is more than the experienced teachers.Based on the above research results,the paper finally puts forward some suggestions.National senior high school English teachers should cultivate the awareness of using discourse markers in classroom teaching,and should pay attention to the diversity of discourse markers,try to avoid some inappropriate use of the phenomenon,so as to create a good English learning environment for students.