A Study Of Discourse Markers Used By English Model Teachers And Student Teachers In Chinese EFL Pedagogical Settings

This study examines the discourse markers used by English model teachers andstudent teachers in Chinese EFL pedagogical settings drawing upon two small-scalecorpora: model middle school teacher classroom discourse corpus (MMSTCDC) andstudent teacher classroom discourse corpus (STCDC). Specifically, it investigates thesimilarities and differences of the discourse marker uses between model teachers andstudent teachers from a functional linguistic perspective. The results show that both ofthe two groups of teachers use discourse markers as helpful devices to organize theirclassroom discourse in terms of interpersonal, referential, structural and cognitivefunctions. There is an obvious difference between the two groups of teachers withregard to their uses of discourse markers in their classroom discourse: model teachersuse a wider range of discourse markers with higher frequencies whereas studentteachers are relatively restricted to the interpersonal category.