An Investigation On The Use Of Discourse Markers In High School Seniors’ English Writing

English writing is one of essential skills to be mastered by high school seniors.Both High School English Curriculum Standards(2020)and College Entrance Examination Scoring Standard in English Writing have definite requirements on the coherence and completeness of the English compositions.Discourse marker is an important means to achieve cohesion and coherence.It is regarded as a significant indicator to measure learners’ English writing ability(He Ziran,2006).Therefore,the investigation on how discourse markers are used in high school seniors’ English writing will be beneficial for the teaching of English writing.Based on the theory of relevance,cohesion and coherence,this paper takes high school seniors as research subjects,successively collects 183 writing samples for three times,counts up discourse markers and divides them into high-level group and low-level group in accordance with their composition score.179 valid questionnaires are collected and 5 students from the high-level group and 5 from the low-level group are interviewed.This paper analyzes the features of the use of discourse markers in high school seniors’ English writing from the aspects of frequency,variety and accuracy.The differences between the high-level group and the low-level group are explored as well.This study mainly puts forward the following questions:(1)What are the features of the use of discourse markers in English writing by High School Seniors?(2)What are the differences in the use of discourse markers between high-level and low-level groups in English writing? This study finds that the discourse markers used by high school seniors in their English compositions consist of 3 categories and 12 subcategories.The category of strengthening is used most frequently among the major categories,among which addition is the most obvious one.The less frequent ones are contradiction and contextual implication.In terms of variety,the most diverse discourse markers are enumeration in the category of contextual implication,while the least diverse ones are the subcategories of reversion,contrasting,inferencing and stating the results.As for accuracy,there are misuse,overuse,and misspelling when students use discourse markers in their English writing.Students in the high-level group use more frequent and more diverse strengthening,contradiction,and contextual implication than those in those in the low-level group,with the most obvious difference in contextual implication.For accuracy,the students in the high-level group performs better in contextual implication but worse in strengthening and contradiction than students in the low-level group.On the basis of the above findings,this paper proposes implications for the teaching of discourse markers in high school English writing.It is hoped that this research will contribute to improving the use of discourse markers and enhancing students’ English writing ability as well.