Discourse Markers And Foreign Language Composition Teaching

This thesis, based on the relevance theory, stresses the important role of discourse markers in the generation and interpretation of discourse and aims to probe the functions of them in foreign language composition of undergraduates in China. Strategies on the improvement of composition teaching are also suggested on the ground of previous analysis.Generally speaking, two major study topics of pragmatics are the generation and interpretation of discourse. Grice (1975) proposes Conversational Implicature theory, which lays emphasis on the speaker and presumes that the speaker follows the Principle of Cooperation in communication and the listener is expected to infer the implicature when he violates the CP on purpose. This proposal is developed by many cognitive approaches later, and among them, relevance theory has received most attention. Relevance theory is a cognitive approach in the field of pragmatics, which probes the nature of human communication from psychological point of view and stresses the roles of both sides in communication. So this thesis bases all the researches and analysis on the theory. A thorough and correct understanding of relevance and communication is crucial to the comprehension of the theory.Sperber and Wilson put forward two general principles to illustrate the main idea of them: the cognitive principle and the communicative principle. The former means that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance, which predicts people's cognitive behavior and guide their behavior;and the latter means every acts of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance, which based itself on the former principle. They also suggest three types of possible contextual effects, different from those in traditional concept, between newly presented information and old information: (a) contextual implication, (b) strengthenings, (c) contradictions resulting in the erasure of premises from the context.They claim that in order to achieve successful communication, the communicators tend to exploit ostensive stimuli to make it easier for the audience to interpret the intended meaning, while the audience tend to pick up the most relevant stimuli and infer the intended meanings in the light of the stimuli and contextual assumptionsalready made in their cognition, which is claimed to be the ostensive-inferential model. According to the model, the process of communication is a process of inference, and it is achieved through the recognition of the ostensive stimuli provided by the communicators. Relevance is the principle constraining inference and contextual effect is an essential condition to the degree of relevance. There is direct proportion between relevance and effect. However, contextual effect itself isn't enough in assessing the degree of relevance;the psychological effort people take in processing the information should also be taken into consideration. In relevance-theoretic terms, other things being equal, the less the processing effort required, the more relevant the input will be.Thus the paper bases the study of discourse markers on the introduction of relevance theory. Discourse markers are very common elements and they are usually words or units which perform certain functions in discourse. Levinson (1983) points out that DMs don't have prepositional meanings but have important pragmatic functions. DMs function as signals or ostensive stimuli which guide the audience to an easier interpretation of the intended meaning of the communicator to achieve the contextual effect. It is under the guidance of DMs that the audience is able to process the information with least possible effort and thus achieve the largest contextual effect. Many researches before are undertaken in the framework of cohesion theory, this paper attempts to investigate the multifunction DMs operate in the generation and interpretation of discourse in chapter two and illustrate the three functions of them: 1) textual function;2) interactional function;3) attitudinal function. The classification of DMs in chapter three is based on the contextual effects listed above.Given the functions performed by DMs in discourse, the paper wants to test whether they play an important role in university students' writings in China. So a tentative study on 60 argumentations of students in Shandong University of Science and Technology is carried out and the data analysis of the use of DMs results in the confirmation of assumptions: 1) The ability of harnessing discourse markers are closely related to the students' English proficiency;2) The more .sentences are there in a discourse, the more DMs;or the easier the writing task is, the more DMs;3) The frequency of DMs in discourse is in direct proportion with the score it gets.The verification of the assumptions and the problems demonstrated in the study challenge the present teaching and learning methods in writing practice. Two approaches to writing are popular nowadays and they are product approach andprocess approach, both of which have their merits and shortcomings. So this thesis suggests feasible ways to improve the present situation in students' writings based on the accomplishment of former researchers. It discusses the ways from two main aspects and they are the aspect of input and the one of output, the former including reading and listening, and the latter referring to writing itself, translating and doing exercises. They are strategies proposed on the basis of relevance theory, and gives prominence to the interaction between writer and reader. Students are encouraged to develop a good sense of audience and write for the readers, so that they can be more aware of the importance of employing DMs in writing. Hopefully they may shed light on foreign language composition teaching in China.The paper ends with a conclusion that discourse markers play an important role in the generation and interpretation of discourse and correct and efficient harnessing of them is helpful to the students' performance in writing. The improvement of teaching method thus proves to be quite necessary. This dynamic study on discourse markers and foreign language composition teaching will be stimulating to most foreign language teachers in China. It is meaningful in both theory and practice. The author of the paper admits that There may be faults in methods and analysis for it is only a tentative research. The data collection in chapter four are only from argumentations, so the conclusion finally arrived at may be questionable in other styles of writings. More effort is necessary for the author to exert in the future study.