A Study Of Middle School English Teachers' Use Of Discourse Markers From A Relevance-theoretic Perspective

Discourse markers (hereafter, DMs), as one of the most important subject matters, have been studied both at home and abroad from different perspectives, such as grammatical-pragmatic, semantic-pragmatic and cognitive-pragmatic ones. The cognitive-pragmatic perspective proposed by Blakemore based on Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory is widely adopted in the study of DMs. According to relevance theory, DMs function as constraints on the process of utterance production and interpretation. The function of DMs leads us to propose a hypothesis that how teachers use DMs in middle school classes directly relates to how the students understand teacher talk. The present study is intended to analyze the use of DMs by middle school teachers from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The main concerns include how the teachers use DMs in terms of the distribution, frequency and features, how these DMs used by the teachers can be classified according to different pragmatic functions, and how the DMs affect the students'understanding of the teacher talk in classroom.The thesis is an empirical study which adopts both the quantitative and qualitative research methods. Data was collected from the classes organized by The Sixth National High School English Teaching Demonstration and Discussion Conference and the analysis of teachers'use of DMs made in this study is totally based on the data collected.The study results mainly include the following:First, there are limited DMs used by the teachers. The most frequently used DMs are"ok, yes, right, and, now, so".Second, the teachers are prone to use simple DMs (one-word DMs) rather than complex DMs (phrasal DMs). For example, the use of besides is more frequent than that of in addition.Third, the female teachers use more DMs than male teachers both in terms of types and frequency.Fourth, the use of DMs in classroom can help students better understand the teacher talk. These DMs used by the teachers are mainly classified into three types: (1) DMs introducing the contextual implication; (2) DMs strengthening the existing assumptions of the students about the teacher's previous utterances; (3) DMs contradicting the students'existing assumptions. The findings of the thesis, though limited, contribute to the understanding of teachers'use of DMs in middle school classroom. Meanwhile, the findings also shed light on teaching English as a foreign language.