The Cognitive And Pragmatic Investigation Of Discourse Markers In Senior High School Students’ English Writings

Discourse marker is a very common ingredient of discourse. As the name implies,discourse markers are markers on the discourse level. The function of discoursemarkers is to point out or highlight the semantic relations between discourse units.However, they cannot create semantic relations, even when they are missing,discourse semantic relationships still exist. Roughly speaking, discourse markers are agroup of words that have little effect on sentence meaning, but can display thediscourse structure.Looking at previous studies, we found that, little research has been done onchanges of discourse markers in English writing of Chinese high school studentsarising from changes on their cognitive level. Therefore, this article takes this as abreakthrough point, taking Grade One to Grade Three of Zhangzhou No.1MiddleSchool in Fujian Province as the survey base. By doing so, I hope I can do my part tocomplete the theoretical research in the field of discourse markers in English writingof Chinese high school students.This study chooses one regular class respectively as research subject from GradeOne to Grade Three of Zhangzhou No.1Middle School in Fujian Province. And thedata shows that, high school students are aware of cognitive pragmatics. Theirawareness of cognitive pragmatics increases with the grade, in other words, itincreases with language proficiency, during which, they pay more attention to the useof discourse markers. Namely,(1)in the writing process, high school learnersconsciously use the discourse markers to show the relationship between the sentencesand paragraphs, discourse markers are used in high frequency on the whole;(2)withthe higher grade, the English learners become more sensitive to the English featuresas the knowledge and skills accumulate. As a whole, Grade Two and Three use widerrange of discourse markers than the Grade One, students of the higher grade have abetter grasp of discourse structure and the integrity of output.However, the survey also shows that:(1) high school English learners tend to useexcessive discourse markers, they don’t have a good command of the discoursemarker to connect the information;(2) and they lack the sense of style, and haven’tfully master the proper use of discourse markers;(3) as for some discourse markers,they are under-used or overused;(4) in addition, the misuse of discourse markers ofhigh school English learners is also an important issue.