A Study On Teachers’ Discourse Markers In High School English Classroom From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Discourse markers (DMs) are a common linguistic phenomenon. They exist in all countries’ languages and play an assignable role in human verbal communication. Soon after the publication of Schiffrin’s book, Discourse Markers, academic circle drew attention to the research on discourse markers. Yet different researchers interpret DMs differently, thus putting forward different definitions of DMs. In linguistics, DMs are currently regarded as words or expressions, which don’t contribute to any propositional content of the discourse, don’t affect true value of the discourse, and have a somewhat empty meaning. They own emotional and expressive function, relevant to context and are independent in syntax. Examples of DMs include "oh","well","then","you know", etc. DMs have been studied from syntactic-pragmatic, semantic-pragmatic perspectives to cognitive-pragmatic one by different scholars. The learning of foreign languages of universal Senior High School students comes from school and class, or rather, from teachers. For at the very beginning, teacher talk is the main resource of SLA(Second Language Acquisition) of the students. Students’DMs learning is closely related to their teacher’s DMs use, which plays a leading role in the interaction between students and teacher in class as well as in the students’ interpretation for what the teacher wants to convey. Thus, the research on high school English teachers’DMs application in classroom has important theoretical and practical meaning.The theoretical frame of this thesis is "the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation", by Jef. Verschueren, Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). The theory holds that language use is a process in which language users make continual linguistic choices during communication. They make choices largely on the basis of three features of language (variability, negotiability and adaptability) and adaptation has four angles of investigations (contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, salience of the adaptation processes).The research of this thesis is the combination of the adaptation theory and teaching practice. Six classes in Grade One from Fu Jin First One Middle Schools are selected for class instruction recording. Then recording transcription tool is used to transcribe the recording into text so that statistics and analysis can be made for answering four questions proposed in this thesis:(1) What is the most frequently used two DMs and the least used two DMs in high school English teacher talk in classroom?(2) What is the difference between young teachers and experienced teachers in using DMs?(3) What is the difference between the female teachers and male teachers in using DMs?(4) How is the adaptation of DMs realized in high school English classroom practice?Data analysis yields the findings that (1) the two most frequently used DMs in high school English teacher talk in class setting are OK and And, and the two least frequently used DMs in high school English teacher talk are You see and Or.(2) there are29types of DMs collected from the recording, among which25types are used in young female teachers’class instruction,29types are used by experienced teachers and19types are used in young male teachers’class instruction. Then it can be substantially supposed that the use of female teachers’ DMs is more ample than that of male teachers’discourse markers. What’more, the use of DMs by experienced teachers is more ample than that by young teachers.(3) male teachers and female teachers differ in the use of causal markers, sequential markers, conclusive markers, repetitive markers and enumerative markers, of which male teachers use causal markers, sequential markers, and conclusive markers more frequently while female teachers use_repetitive markers and enumerative markers more frequently. Then it follows that male teachers are more logical than female teachers. They often use some DMs with characteristic of logic functions. And female teachers are more careful. They often use explanatory and repetitive DMs.(4) as a means of adaptation, the functions of DMs in high school English teacher talk in class settings are embodied mainly in three aspects:adaptation to linguistic context, adaptation to social conventions and adaptation to psychological motivations.