The Function Of Discourse Markers In The Listening Comprehension Of Chinese College Students

Discourse markers (DMs) are those words, phrases or sentences that indicate the coherence relationship in a discourse and at the same time contain no components with semantic meanings. The lack of semantic components indicates that they do not signal meaning propositionally or semantically, but function partly as meta-language, which will facilitate the listening comprehension process. With the development of the study on discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, discourse markers, though under various names, has become a new field for linguistic study that attracts many researchers.As a focus of semantics, computational linguistics and syntax, discourse markers have been approached by many researchers from various perspectives, such as Flowerdew (1995) from the aspect of second language comprehension, Brinton (1996) from discourse functions, Andersen (1998) from relevance, Lenk (1998a) coherence, etc. However, the experimental study on second language education focus mainly on two fields: reading process and dialogue. Few studies have been done on the function of discourse markers in listening process of second language learners. Some researchers (Dunkel and Davis, 1994; Nam, 1997; Jung, 2003, etc.) did significant studies in this field, but nearly all their experiments were based on lecture comprehension. Compared with lecture listening, the forms of a listening course and a listening test are more common in Chinese college education. Furthermore, participants in the experiments conducted by the researchers mentioned above were not Chinese L2 learners. Therefore, an experiment of the effect of discourse markers on Chinese college students'listening is necessary.Under such circumstances, this thesis aims at the effect of discourse markers in the listening process of Chinese college students. In the experimental designing process, the difference of listening competence between higher and lower college English learners and the difference between the discourses with different difficulties have been taken into consideration. The purpose of the current experiment is to determine to what extend the discourse markers affect second language learners of different levels under various texts evaluated by a testing questionnaire. Background knowledge, which has proved having a significant effect on listening comprehension, has been duly controlled in the experiment by means of a topic familiarity survey.The experiment undertakes a quantitative analysis on the learners of two different levels, with and without markers. The experimental result shows that discourse markers affect more learners of higher levels than those of lower, especially in a complex discourse. Based on the results, some specific suggestions to the college language listening teaching in China colleges were given.