Research On Usages Of Discourse Markers In Teacher Talk Of TCSL Classrooms

In the TCSL (Teaching Chinese as a Second Language) classroom, in order to organize discourse more fluently so as to help the students comprehend the contents and interact well with students, teachers will adopt some words like "ah, well", these words will neither help to express the meaning of sentence, nor increase some information of the sentence, but they will reflect teachers tones, attitudes and emotions, they will also coherent the statement before and after them. These words are called "Discourse Markers"(DMs). Discourse Markers can effectively promote interaction and emotional communication between teachers and students, and organize classroom activities more smoothly. To study the usage of DMs in teacher talk will help us gain a deeper understanding of the function of DMs and their role in the teaching process.But till now, researchers in the TCSL field pay little attention to the DMs in teacher talk, so there are few studies about them. What are the main functions of Discourse Markers in the classroom? Are there any differences in the use of Discourse Markers among teachers of different experience? If so, which aspects can we recognize them? Are there any problems in the use of Discourse Markers? If so, what are the problems and how to improve the use of them? All these questions are worthy of consideration. Therefore, in this article, we attend to use the methods of classroom observation, corpus analysis and semi-structured interview for the study of Discourse Markers of four teachers, these teachers are all in charge of elementary Chinese comprehensive course. By studying then-usage of Discourse Markers in the classroom, we can find out the functions of different Discourse Markers, the similarities and differences among teachers with different experience and the reasons for them.After the analysis and discussion, we find that the usages of Discourse Markers among four teachers can be divided into two categories:Interpersonal Discourse Markers and Textual Discourse Markers. Under these categories we can still divided them into different functions. The Interpersonal DMs help teachers to interact with students more smoothly and be closer to students. The Textual DMs assist in connecting the context and organize the discourse better. In the usage of these two categories, the expert, the proficient and the novice have shown various differences. As compared to the novice, the expert and the proficient use more DMs which show their emotional attitudes, shared knowledge. They also use more DMs to start their topic, continue their topic and change their topic. We think that they may be influenced by the teaching experience and teaching philosophy of teachers, and the conversational styles of individuals.In addition, we also find that there are some problems when the expert, the proficient and the novice use the DMs in their classroom. We can conclude them into three aspects: the overuse of DMs, the lack of DMs and the changeless forms of DMs. In order to solve these problems, we have put forward some suggestions:the TCSL teachers should learn more about the rational knowledge of DMs, and when they use the DMs in their class, they should raise their monitoring consciousness. Relevant institutions, such as the Teacher Training Agency, should add the usages of DMs as a part of the training course.