A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese English Majors' Use Of Discourse Marker So In Spoken Language

As a common language phenomenon, discourse markers (DMs) mainly facilitate the understanding of an utterance or constraint the comprehension of a discourse. As DMs studies become deeper and wider, researchers have turned their focuses from"syntactic/ semantic--pragmatic"perspective to"pragmatic--cognitive"perspective. Currently, studies on DMs used by Chinese learners, who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL), are mainly focusing on the description of learners'misuses. Not many studies aim at exploring the reasons for the misuses by Chinese EFL learners, and those who have such aims tend to attribute the inaccurate usages to surface reasons, such as learners'insufficient language proficiency, pragmatic transfer and situational anxiety. Therefore, studies that try to explore the deep reasons for these phenomena, such as reasons from the perspective metapragmatic awareness, are even fewer.This research describes the differences of DM so used by Chinese College students majoring in English and that used by native speakers, analyzes main reasons for Chinese EFL learners'misuses from the perspective of language proficiency, pragmatic transfer and situational anxiety, and tries to explore deep reasons from the perspective metapragmatic awareness, with the purpose of providing some constructive pedagogical implications.Spoken data employed for the present research were taken from Task Three of Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 (SECCL 2.0), a Chinese learner corpus and the interview part in the spoken branch of British National Corpus (BNC) which is used as the native corpus. With the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, conclusions are obtained. First of all, the total frequency of DM so used by Chinese EFL learners is obviously lower than that used by native speakers. Secondly, Chinese EFL learners tend to underuse the conjunction so and overuse adverb so as well as substitute so. Reasons for these phenomena are various: the insufficient language proficiency of Chinese EFL learners; the situational anxiety which has great influence on learners'performance in their tests; and the lack of appropriate metapragmatic awareness.The findings yielded in this research not only has constructive implications for text book designers, but also sheds light on current pedagogy of Second Language (L2) in China. Therefore, L2 teachers can have a better understanding of learners'problems and accordingly employ proper strategies, thus helping learners to cultivate appropriate awareness of the role of DMs in constructing spoken discourses and improve their language proficiency.