A Study Of Senior High School Students' Use Of Discourse Markers In Spoken English

This paper's aim is to investigate the characteristics on the use of discourse markers(DMs)by the senior high school students from grade three in their achievement of oral tasks in a testing situation,with a primary focus on the general characteristics of discourse markers used by senior high school students,and a secondary focus on the situation of different oral tasks when the students use discourse markers.Spoken data used for this study were taken from the experiment the author conducted in a high school.Three tasks were involved in the study: a dialogue,storytelling with questions as tips and storytelling with pictures as tips.Simple Random Sampling was used to choose 30 subjects as samples of the study,and thus there were 75 samples for all tasks.The classification followed in the data analysis was mainly based on the integration of Philip's,Pauk's and Schiffrin's framework.The findings can be listed as follows according to the data analyzed by software AntConc which is very flexible and useful in helping to study texts or analyze language data: Firstly,senior high school students use DMs most frequently in conversational turns and least frequently in story telling and use logical-connector-type markers(LCTMs)more frequently than filler-type markers(FTMs)in story telling.Secondly,senior high school students overuse some additive,emphasizing,contrast markers or filler-type markers with semantic meaning(SMFM)like “and,very,but,I think” and seldom use repetitive markers,alternative markers,summarizing markers like in addition,as well as,at the same time,otherwise,on the other hand,in other words,therefore,whenever,indeed,third,actually,at first and neither...nor.These DMS were used only once in all tasks.Thirdly,the top three types of DMs used by all subjects in three tasks in order are additive markers,filler-type markers with semantic meaning and emphasizing markers.The results of the study might have some enlightenment for English teaching.The quantitative description of discourse markers analyzed from senior high school students' oral production in three types of tasks might give English teachers some inspiration of designing different oral tasks to increase students' use of discourse markers,and English teachers may arouse students' consciousness of the functions of discourse markers in constructing oral discourses.Future studies could be conducted to compare with nativeEnglish speakers' use of discourse markers from middle schools.