A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Discourse Markers In Their Oral Comment-making Discourse In A Testing Setting

This thesis reports a study on the use of discourse markers by the Chinese EFL learners in their comments made on a given topic in a testing situation. It seeks to describe the general pattern of use of discourse markers (DMs) identified in the L2 speakers'oral production, and explore the differences in the use of DMs across the learners of different proficiency levels. The ultimate purpose of this study is to find out what are the possible relations between the Chinese L2 learners'use of DMs and their oral performance.The materials employed in the study were retrieved from SWECCL, a Chinese learner corpus, from which 30 cases were selected. Based on the scores of the comment-making task that the test takers obtained in the TEM Band-8 Oral Test, the cases were divided into high- and low-level group. The classification of DMs in this study is based on Philip's conceptual framework of functional taxonomy of DMs, Fraser's classification and Wang Lifei & Zhu Weihua's. This study focuses on two major types of DMs, textual and pragmatic. Textual is further divided into additive, sequential, contrastive, causal, concessive and alternative markers, and pragmatic into meaningful and meaningless fillers. The data analysis yielded the following major findings:Firstly, of the two broad types, pragmatic DMs are used more frequently than textual ones, revealing the spoken characteristics shared by L2 learners, since pragmatic fillers are more likely to be used by the learners as a communicative strategy.Secondly, of all different types of DMs, either textual or pragmatic, the discourse marker of and enjoys the highest frequency of occurrence (34%) in the learners'oral comment-making discourse, which is consistent with the findings in most of the relevant studies. However, pragmatic and constitutes a much bigger proportion than textual and (71% and 29% respectively), which confirms the point made earlier that and is used as a major means of discourse organizing or as a strategy of keeping the learners'talk going on.Thirdly, the type of additive was most frequently used by the learners in the textual category, and sequential, causal and contrastive enjoy the similar frequency of use, but smaller than that of additive. However, concessive and alternative were rarely used. The micro-analysis indicates that the use of textual types, unlike that in the written production, was more intended by the speakers as a discourse means to express the simple propositional relationships such as so for causal relations and but for contrastive relations. The rare use of concessive and alternative is either related to the oral nature of the testing task or less orally characterized.Of the pragmatic DMs subtypes, meaningless fillers accounts for an overwhelmingly bigger percentage than meaningful fillers (77% and 23% respectively), which suggests that pragmatic DMs is used more as a communicative strategy than as a discourse strategy.Fourthly, the cross-level comparisons reveal that no significant differences were found between the high- and low-level groups in the frequency of use of DMs, but there is a significant difference in the distribution of textual and pragmatic across the two groups, suggesting that speakers of high proficiency level have stronger discourse competence than those of low level in the structuring of information. By contrast, low-level speakers are likely to use DMs as a communicative strategy or a strategy of veiling the insufficiency of their oral proficiency.Finally, the correlation analysis indicates that the use of textual DMs is not significantly correlated to the test takers'oral performance, but the use of pragmatic DMs is negatively correlated with the test takers'oral performance. As indicated in the detailed case analysis, the negative correlation is partially caused by the learners'overuse of meaningless fillers. It may follow that the use of pragmatic DMs may become an effective indicator to L2 learners'oral proficiency.Pedagogically, from the perspective of L2 teachers, the use of DMs could be potentially used as an effective means of oral assessment. In the classroom teaching, L2 learners'"conscious perception"of use of DMs should be cultivated to help themselves to develop their discourse competence rather than simply use them as a communicative strategy.