A Comparative Study Of The Application Of Discourse Marker Well By Native English Speakers And Chinese EFL Learners

As a common language expression, discourse markers (DMs) serve as a linguistic choice by the utterer to guide and constrain the proper interpretation for the hearer. Since1970s, DMs have attracted broad attention home and abroad and have been researched from various perspectives. Among all DMs, well has probably received most of the attention and has been thoroughly studied. Though, DM well has been studied by quite a few Chinese scholars, it is still generally undervalued in Chinese L2teaching and learning.The present study gives a comprehensive review of the previous studies on DMs and DM well, introduces the theoretical framework-the linguistic adaptation theory, and elaborates the realization of pragmatic functions of DM well, its syntactic positions and its contextual collocations. Afterwards, the author makes a comparative study of DM well applied by native English speakers and Chinese EFL learners in terms of its general frequency, pragmatic functions, syntactic positions and contextual collocations and attempts to explore the possible explanations for the contrastive differences in the application of DM well and the implications for L2teaching and learning in China.The present study shows that Chinese EFL learners are inferior to native speakers in using DM well in terms of both the frequency and the types of pragmatic functions. As to its syntactic positions, Chinese students use DM well initially in the majority of cases, like native English speakers do. But there are still differences between the two groups in this aspect, because the syntactic positions of DM well are basically determined by its pragmatic functions. For contextual collocations of DM well, Chinese students lack diversity. They cannot employ various contextual collocations to make the conversation more lively and leading. This may result from insufficient L2input and output, negative transfer of mother language, pragmatic fossilization and poor L2teaching and learning strategies. Therefore, massive comprehensible language input is of great importance. During the process of L2acquisition, attention should be paid to minimize negative transfer and pragmatic fossilization. Meanwhile, good teaching and learning strategies will be of great benefit.