Cognition Of Discourse Marker Well By English Majors In Chinese Context

In language communications, using discourse markers is one of the effective ways for thespeakers to make the spoken discourses eloquent and to achieve a better effect. The discoursemarkers (DM) include but, and, well, I mean, I think, you know, etc. Among all of them, the DMwell attracts most attention from researchers abroad and at home. Blakemore, Schourup, Juckerand Ran Yongping, etc, have made many kinds of classifications on the pragmatic functions of theDM well. At the same time, Anderson et, al, Trillo, He Ziran, Wang Lifei and Xu Manfei havedone many quantitive researches on it. All these studies can not only help the English learners tounderstand the pragmatic functions of DM well, but can also help the learners to resolve theproblems in English learning process. However, up to now there have been few researches on thecontrast of DM well used by both English native speakers and the Chinese EFL learners. Therefore,on the basis of corpus, the paper will study the Chinese EFL learners'cognition of DM well .The research in this paper is based on the two corpora, SECCL (Spoken English Corpus ofChinese Learners) and MICASE, a native spoken English corpus made by Michigan University.After intensive analysis, the two corpora are proved to be comparable and can be used in thisresearch. And the data collection tool that is used here is the Concordance software, which canprocess words and phrases in a text. The data is collected in terms of frequencies of DM well(including general frequencies, syntactical positions and its collocations) and its pragmaticfunctions. According to the statistic data, the results show that the DM well used by Chinese EFLlearners are much different from the English native speakers. So we can see the Chinese EFLlearners have not acquired the DM well effectively, and most of the learners are not aware of theappropriate uses of the DM well. Then, the author probes into many possible factors from variedaspects and angles with different theories, such as negative transfer theory, pragmatic fossilization,classroom instructions and the notice of the learners, etc. We find there are several possible factorsfor this. First, the teachers have not paid sufficient attention to the instructions on the uses ofdiscourse markers in class.And the negative transfer of Chinese can also affect the cognition of theEnglish discourse markers. At the same time, the learners don't have the language processingability and can be easily affected by pragmatic fossilization. In order to improve the learners'acquisition level of English discourse markers, in the end, the author points out some helpful suggestions for the English teaching and learning strategies.