A Conversational Analysis Study On Discourse Markers Of High School English Teacher

As an important part of teacher’s classroom language,teacher discourse markers have received widespread attention from researchers in the field of second language teaching abroad in recent years.The unique interpersonal lubrication and guiding understanding effect of discourse markers can improve the vividness and naturalness of foreign language classrooms,achieve good teacher-student interaction effects,and improve teaching efficiency.The teacher uses the appropriateness,richness and meticulous performance of the discourse markers to provide foreign language learners with examples of language use,guide students to subtly acquire authentic foreign language expressions in the process of imitating the teacher’s language,and cultivate practical second-language communication talents.At present,there is not much attention paid to the study of teacher discourse markers in the field of classroom communication interaction.The research methods used are more traditional,and it is difficult to find research results with high practical value.Therefore,it is necessary to try to use a more illustrative approach to the study of teacher discourse markers.From the perspective of classroom communication and interaction,this study uses the research method of conversation analysis.Taking the class videos of the winners of the 10 th National High School English Quality Class Competition as the corpus source,the sequences of high-quality class teachers using discourse markers “okay” and “so” in the process of communicating with students are selected as the research object.According to the transcription rules established by Gail Jefferson,the data system is transcribed.Based on the transcription corpus,this paper is studied within the framework of conversation analysis.The research questions are:1.What are the sequence position characteristics of the teacher’s discourse markers in high school English classroom interactions?2.What are the turn design forms of the teacher’s discourse markers in high school English classroom interactions?Finally,after analyzing the transcription corpus,this study draws relevant conclusions: 1.From a macroscopic point of view,the teacher’s discourse markers “okay” and “so” can appear in a variety of sequence positions,such as pre-extension and post-expansion,so that the initiation of the extension is more natural,and with the characteristics of various extensions,enrich the teacherstudent dialogue framework as a whole,making the teacher-student communication process more real and perfect.First of all,the teacher can use the appropriate pre-extension to make preliminary tests to pave the way for the appearance of the adjacency pair,and at the same time,with the help of the discourse markers “okay” and “so”,the pre-expansion can play a role in attracting attention and avoiding the situation that the pre-expansion is not noticed;secondly,the post-expansion can make the process of teacher-student interaction more complete or deeper,“okay” and “so” can maintain the connection between the post-expansion and the front turn,avoiding the abruptness of the post-expansion.2.From a microscopic point of view,“okay” and “so” can perform complex communicative behaviors in different forms of turn design.First of all,when “okay” or “so”contribute in the form of individual turn design,although the specific procedural meaning of the two in the teacher-student speech interaction is different,but in essence,they both implement the teacher’s communication behavior of “abandoning the current turn and inviting students to make further contributions”,in addition,the individual turn design form realizes the minimal effort to help students understand the teacher’s discourse,improve communication efficiency,and promote the natural and smooth progress of teacher-student speech communication;secondly,when“okay”or “so” contributes in the form of Non-individual turn design,by skillfully using “okay” or “so”with different discourse markers and propositional meaning expressions,high-quality class teachers construct the context of inheritance and transition,and perform a variety of verbal communication behaviors,such as responding,inferring,elaborating,correcting,issuing teacher instructions,attracting students’ attention,opening and ending topics,guiding topic progress,and shifting topics.Since the study object of this study was the use of “okay” and “so” by high-quality class English teachers,the scope was small,and more discourse markers were not explored.Secondly,the corpus collected is limited to the 10 th National High School English Quality Class Competition,and more English quality classes are not observed,which may ignore more interesting discursive marker phenomenon.However,this study truly and meticulously reflects the flexible use of English discourse markers by excellent teachers from a microscopic perspective,which can provide relevant references for front-line English teachers and improve the relevant research on teachers’ discourse markers.