A Study Of Teachers' Use Of Discourse Markers In Netease Open Courses From The Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Discourse markers(henceforth,DMs)are a very common linguistic phenomenon and they are very important in people's daily communication.Since the 1970 s,with the development of linguistics,scholars have become increasingly aware of the importance of DMs and have made great achievements on DMs.In the last few decades,teacher utterance has been an important topic and most studies deal with the features and second language acquisitionof teacher utterance.With the development of new technology,open online courses have become more and more popular all over the world.But there is a paucity of research on teacher utterance inopen online courses.This study adopts relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson as the theoretical framework to study the pragmatic functions of the teacher discourse markers(DMs)of two Harvard University's open online courses according to Blakemore's classification of DMs.The study integrates quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data.Data of 16 lectures was collected from the two open online courseson Net Ease,the Justice and the Positive Psychology.Based on the data,two questions will be addressed and explored in this study: What are the commonly used DMs by teachers in the open online courses? What are the pragmatic functions of DMs employed by the teachers in the open online courses based on Blakemore's classification of DMs from the relevance-theoretic perspective?The resultsshow: First,the DMs used by the teachers in open online courses arediversified.The most frequently used DMs by the teachers in their lectures are such words as and,so,because,but,well and now.Second,the two teachers can help students better know their purposes and intentions by using DMs.Different types of DMs can serve as diverse pragmatic functions and the pragmatic functions of the same DMs can also change according to different contexts.There are three functions the DMs used by the teachers could perform:(1)DMs allowing the derivation of the contextual implications of the teachers' utterance;(2)DMs strengthening the students' existing assumptions about the teachers' foregoing utterance(by providing better evidence for it);(3)DMs contradicting the existing assumptions of the students about the teachers' preceding utterance.The findings of the present study are beneficial to the comprehension of teachers' use of DMs in open online courses.So it is suggested that teachers should apply them to their own teaching.