Application Of Discourse Markers In The English Composition Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

The study on Discourse Markers has attracted more attention and becomes a focus in linguistic study since the publication of Discourse Markers by Schiffrin in 1987 and Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Discourse markers are one of the common language phenomena in discourse analysis and they are usually words or units which perform certain functions in discourse. Levinson (1983) points out that DMs do not have propositional meanings but have important pragmatic functions.The thesis illustrates two general principles of Relevance Theory: the cognitive principle and communicative principle, and meanwhile, the thesis also discusses how the hearer/writer guides the hearer/reader to understand the intended meaning. It is under the guidance of DMs that the audience is able to process the information with least effort and thus achieve the largest contextual effect.The thesis studies the application of DMs in writing. By DMs, the discourse is organized into a coherent text so that the reader can find information with optimal relevance. In addition, the thesis introduces three pragmatic functions of DMs: (1) the interactional function; (2) the attitudinal function; (3) the textual function. In the thesis, the study of the application of DMs is mainly based on the textual function.The thesis studies the application of discourse markers in English writing by senior high school students, and 60 students from the Dongping Middle School in Tai'an City were asked to write two compositions, and meanwhile, the author also carried out an interview with 12 senior high school teachers to make a further study of the usage of DMs. By the analysis of the collected data, the author draws the following conclusions: (1) students have already possessed the cognitive awareness of encoding procedural meaning to reduce the reader's cognitive effort by using DMs; (2) the use of DMs in writing is influenced by the English level of senior high school students; (3) the use of DMs is related to the difficulty level of the writing. Meanwhile, the author has an interview with 12 teachers to further confirm the above conclusions and finds that some problems existing in teaching methods are also reasons of the problems of students'compositions.Based on the analysis of the application of DMs in writing of senior high school students, some suggestions for EFL learning and teaching are proposed. It is hoped that they can be of help to teachers and students.