A Study On The Use Of Discourse Markers In Senior English Practical Writing

Discourse markers have been widely concerned by scholars since they were put forward.In recent years,the application of discourse markers in second language acquisition based on previous studies have gradually become a hot topic.Besides,it is high school that is an important stage for English learners to acquire language.Moreover,it is clearly mentioned in the new curriculum standard and the English composition scoring standard of the college entrance examination that students are required to use the connective to make their essays coherence and integrity.Both of which are closely related to the use of discourse markers in writing.In recent years,college entrance examination often applies to practical writing,and it emphasizes the structure of the articles and needs more discourse marker to build.Therefore,this research quantitative analyses the three graders learner's English compositions of the ordinary high school.The purpose is to answer the two questions:1.How are discourse maker used in high school English writing? 2.What's the correlation between the use of discourse markers and the writing level of EFL learners in high school English writing?This study has selected the students from three grades of an ordinary high school in Chongqing to participate in the investigation and study.The composition of 200 students in each grade was taken as a study sample by stratified sampling.In addition,the samples were divided into high and low groups by the method(Qin Xiaoqin,2003).In the end,we got 180 samples from the third grade to input text and build corpus.In addition,the search term was established by the classification method of(Chen Xingren,2013)'s discourse marker and we tested the usage of each type of discourse markers.Then,we tested the correlation between the frequency,the types and the misuseof discourse markers in writing and the score of each essay.Finally,we tested the correlation between the usage of discourse markers in teachers spoken language and the textbooks and their use in students' writing.The following conclusions are drawn from this study: 1.The usage of discourse markers in English writing in high school:(1)In terms of frequency,high school students already have a certain use awareness of discourse markers,and every two sentences will use a discourse marker.The use frequency of the three grade markers in high school increased with the increase of grade,and the total number of sentences decreased with the increase of grade.And the number of sentences is inversely proportional to the frequency of discourse markers.(2)In terms of the use of categories,high school learners tend to use the category of intensive association to expand the discourse,followed by the third category of implicit association,and finally,the conflict association.In terms of individual frequencies,the most frequently used ones are and,so,also and such as,while the less frequently used ones are more complex and less used ones.In the small category,add class and inference class use the most,the same class and the choice class use the least;Eighteen small categories are not covered in each grade,but the third grade has the widest coverage and the distribution is the most uniform.The higher group in the progressive class of reinforcement,the comparison of the conflict and the conclusion of the implicit are significantly higher than the lower group.(3)In terms of misuse,the misuse rate of discourse markers is higher,and each article has at least one or two cases of misused discourse markers.The misuse category is mainly overuse,punctuation errors and grammatical errors,among which the highest proportion is added and inferred;Excessive use of discourse markers in grade one is the most;Some colloquial speech markers are used in writing such as ok,you know,oh,etc.2.The frequency,the number of categories and the number of misuse are significantly correlated with the level of writing,which indicates that the use of discourse markers in high school English application is significantly correlated with the quality of writing.