Research On Summary Discourse Markers For Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

From the perspective of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,if foreign students can’t use all kinds of discourse markers correctly,it will not simply affect the acquisition of authentic spoken Chinese,but also restrict the cohesion and coherence of their written Chinese.However,almost all the teaching materials for foreigners haven’t yet classified the knowledge of discourse markers into independent teaching contents.Worse still,most teachers fail to pay enough attention to the teaching of discourse markers,the ontology knowledge of discourse markers is relatively complex,and the majority of foreign students themselves usually have adopted a clear avoidance strategy in Chinese learning.All the above factors have hindered the learners’ quality of Chinese writing to a certain extent.For this reason,we only take the subcategory of Summary Discourse Markers as the object of study,focusing on its application in writing.Firstly,we analyze the background and significance of the thesis topic,and summarize the status quo of overseas study of discourse markers from three perspectives:Coherence Theory,Relevance Theory,and Adaptation Theory supporting the functional research of discourse markers.And we have reviewed in detail at three levels of ontological research of Chinese discourse markers,the application study of discourse markers in the field of TCFL and the study of Summary Discourse Markers in modern Chinese.We find that most domestic scholars still show great interest in the field of spoken Chinese as a foreign language,and few researches on writing teaching,while the study of Summary Discourse Markers in TCFL is extremely rare.Second,we redefine the Summary Discourse Markers as "In the process of verbal or written communication,the speaker sums up his previous discourse,and expresses the main points in concise language in his following discourse,so that the recipient is able to grasp the speaker’s communicative intentions.These linguistic structural components that link the preceding discourse and the subsequent discourse are called Summary Discourse Markers."Then,we divide the Summary Discourse Markers into two types based on the meanings of core word formation morphemes and the different ways in drawing conclusions:"Direct Conclusion type" and "Indirect Conclusion type",in which the "Indirect Conclusion type"can be further divided into two categories of "Inductive Derivation type" and "Causal Derivation type".Then we elaborate their core meanings respectively,and sum up the differences and connections between various types.Moreover,we also make a multi-angle analysis on Causal Conjunctions and Causal Derivation-type Discourse Markers.Plus,through native language corpus analysis,we find there are three cognitive pragmatic functions in the Summary Discourse Markers:a.the speaker’s subjective function,namely,to end the topic,emphasize or confirm the content of the proposition,and indicate or highlight the attitude to the proposition;b.the interpersonal interaction function,which is used to guide the recipient to concentrate on the focus of the discourse and help the recipient follow the cognitive direction;c.the discourse construction function,which mainly refers to the cohesion,restriction,and prompting function of the discourse.In addition,according to the dialectical relationship between textual cohesion and coherence,we find that the combination of the tangible network in the surface structure and the intangible network in the deep semantics is the typical discourse construction mode for Summary Discourse Markers.Finally,by means of the questionnaire,about 60%of the foreign students reported they have never used Summary Discourse Markers in their Chinese writing.By means of the compositional error corpus,we find that there are three types of errors,among which Chinese character writing and lexical forms account for more than 60%of the total errors.Based on the internal and external causes of bias,we provide six remedial measures for TCFL teachers-to improve Chinese language teachers’ awareness of meta-language,pay attention to the basis of sound and shape,take into account both high-frequency and diversity,permeate the teaching of discourse function,combine speaking and writing,and skillfully use examination leverage-to improve foreign learners’ Summary Discourse Marker writing.