A Study On Chinese Students' Usage Of Discourse Markers

Discourse Markers (DMs) are very important in communication. However, the study of DMs in China is not as extensive as that in other countries.This dissertation investigates the Chinese students' usage of DMs through analyzing their usage of you know. It contrasts the Chinese students' usage of DMs in written English and spoken English; and also compares the usage of DMs between Chinese students and native speakers.Data are from three parts: CLEC (Chinese Learners English Corpus); SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners); and results of a questionnaire from 80 students. With the help of ConcAPP, we obtain the following findings: generally speaking, Chinese students do not use DMs as often as native speakers of English; the DMs used in spoken English are much more numerous than those in written English; and the main factors contributing to Chinese students' usage of DMs' are pragmatic transfer, context, and deficiency in language teaching.