A Survey On Current Situation Of English-Major Teachers' Use Of Discourse Markers

Discourse markers are widely used during interaction as a purpose of smoothing the utterances and facilitating mutual understandings. Researches on discourse markers in pedagogic settings are highlighted during the years in order to shed light on student language input as well assecond/foreign language teaching and learning. Thus the present paper commits to explore English-major teachers' use of discourse markers in Xinjiang Normal University based on Long's(1983) Interaction Hypothesis. Four teachers, who are currently teaching Integrated English lesson to basic level English-majors(freshmen and sophomore students), participated in this study. Recording pens are placed on the table to record the teachers' discourses, and after the data collection process, the audio recordings are transcribed into texts. The texts are then analysed by corpus software AntConc. Meanwhile, the same amount of classroom transcripts from native-speaking academic corpus MICASE are also analysed as benchmarks to evaluate the original data. The study tries to answer three research questions:(1) Which DMs are frequently used by English-major teachers?(2) What is the general situation of English-major teachers' use of DMs?(3) What functions of OK/Okay are employed by English-major teachers to facilitate teaching?The results suggest that(1) there are 11 DMs that occurred more than 100 times, which are OK/okay, and, so, right, yeah, yes, or, but, alright, now and because/cuz,while 6 DMs are used less than 5 times, and they are kindof, like, whatabout, second/secondly, exactly, yet;(2) in order to look at the detailed usage of DMs in English-major teachers' class, MICASE, a native-speaking academic corpus, is introduced to set as a standard to make comparison. However, most of the discourse markers are used differently in English-major teachers' discourses compared with native speakers in terms of frequencies.It is found that DMs such as OK/okay, so, right are overused by English-major teachers, while but,because/cuz, you know, I think, I mean,well, kind of, like, and sort of are underused in English-major teachers' classroom. The results indicate that problems exist among English-major teachers' classroom discourses, such as a limited range of discourse marker types and insufficient input of discourse markers;(3) then the study carries on to qualitative analysis in order to narrow down to explore the functions of a particular discourse markerOK/okay employed by the teachers, and found that it mainly plays seven roles, i.e. getting attention, giving feedback, closing, continuing topics, indicating transition, delaying utterances, shifting languages.