Acorpus-based Study Of Discourse Markers Used By Junior High School English Teachers

With the development of science and technology,there are more and more ways to learn English,and students have more opportunities to get access to various English learning materials.However,for junior high school students,teacher talk is still the main source of their English input.As an important part of teacher talk,discourse markers not only affect students’ understanding of teacher talk but also are part of students’ English learning.In recent years,the corpus-based research of discourse markers also has attracted the attention of some scholars.The present study aims to explore the use of discourse markers by junior high school English teachers in class based on a self-built corpus.This study selected eight classes of the Twelfth National Junior High School English High-Quality Classes Demonstration and transcribed what the teachers and students said into eight written text files.The transcripts of the teacher discourse comprise the corpus data,which will be further analyzed with the help of the corpus concordance analysis software Ant Conc 3.5.8(2019).This study attempts to answer four questions:(1)Which discourse markers do junior high school English teachers use in class?(2)What are the frequency and distribution of discourse markers used by junior high school English teachers in class?(3)What are the functions of the most frequently used discourse markers by junior high school English teachers in class?(4)Is there any misuse,underuse,overuse and lack of diversity in junior high school English teachers’ use of discourse markers?The findings of this study indicate that junior high school English teachers used 20 different discourse markers with quite different frequency and distribution.In this corpus,ok,so and and are three most frequently used discourse markers out of the 20 discourse markers.These discourse markers fulfill a variety of functions concerning interpersonal,structural,referential and cognitive categories,for instance,opening topics or closing topics,indicating contrastive or coordinate relations,shifting topics,etc.,which makes classroom discourse more coherent.In addition,there were some cases of misuse,underuse,overuse and lack of diversity in teachers’ use of discourse markers.In view of the above research results,this study proposes the following implications:(1)Teachers should spend time acquiring an adequate knowledge of discourse markers,especially the pragmatic functions.(2)Teachers should find out how native speakers use discourse markers and learn from them.(3)Teachers should consciously make a comparative study of English and Chinese discourse markers to find out the similarities and differences.(4)Teachers should pay attention to the use of discourse markers and try to improve the accuracy of the use of discourse markers in class,avoiding overuse,underuse and misuse of discourse markers.