Approaching English Discourse Markers In College Teacher Talks

Discourse marker has always been a heated topic studied by linguists abroad and at home.Especially in recent years,studies on discourse markers have developed multi-disciplinarily,and an increasing number of studies on discourse markers have been studied at pedagogical setting.In the theoretical frame of Relevance Theory put forward by linguists Sperber and Wilson,this paper is intended to explore the usage of discourse markers in non-native college English teacher talks,as well as to elaborate how non-native and native college teachers differ in using discourse markers in classroom context,and also to make prospect for the future research and use of discourse markers in non-native college teacher talks.The dataset of this paper is mainly taken from several currently popular Open Course Resources Online,including Open Course set up by web portals like NetEase,and “icourse” which is supported by the State Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance.The objects of this research include thirteen college teachers and the four of who lecture in the same serial course.Among the thirteen teachers selected,five teachers are native speakers from Yale,Oxford and New York University,while the other eight non-native college teachers are from leading colleges at home.After qualitative and quantitative studies,the research result shows that: there indeed are some inappropriate uses of discourse markers in non-native college teacher talks,including overuse,misuse,and lack of certain discourse markers.And when it comes to the contrast of discourse markers in non-native and native college teacher discourse,there are distributional and functional differences in the usage of discourse markers.The possible interpretations for those inappropriate uses may be pragmatic failure,which include pragmalinguistic failure and socio-pragmatic failure,while those different uses can be explained by different cognitive assumptions in terms of teaching.On the basis of research results above,in the end of this paper,the author proposes several suggestions for teacher training and development.The author carries the expectation that this paper can make contribution to Chinese college teachers as they can understand the significance of discourse markers and gain a better grasp of discourse markers.