And As A Discourse Marker Among Chinese Non-English Majors

Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are words or short phrases that organize texts. This organization is achieved by showing how the speaker intends the basic message that follows to relate to the prior discourse. Since the 1970s, researchers have been interested in investigating DMs with their growing interest in pragmatic and contextual aspects of utterance interpretation. A rapidly expanding body of research has been dealing with DMs continually throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, DMs now figure prominently not only in the pragmatic and discourse analytic research but also in the studies of language acquisition and language pedagogy, and sociolinguistics.Much of the research on DMs has been done in native speakers' language environments, such as DMs in English, in French, in Chinese and so on. Less research on DMs has been focused on in EFL environments. Especially, there are few empirical studies of a specific discourse marker (henceforth DM) like and in Chinese EFL classroom. For an understanding of this problem, we attempt to investigate the DM of and in the speeches of Chinese non-English majors. As for the data of Chinese students', I attended summer oral English course, 2004, in Wuhan University and collected data of 41 hours 55 minutes from 12 natural classes which comprise 265 students in all. After developing a detailed analysis of Chinese students' data on the DM of and, we make a contrastive study between Chinese students' and native speakers' performance on it. The data of native speakers' is provided by BNC, namely, British National Corpus.Our investigation demonstrates that Chinese students and native speakers share similarities and also have differences on both ideational and pragmatic functions of and, which are described in detail as follows:In the part of ideational functions of and, we find Chinese students employ and working at different levels of idea structure of the discourse. However, the contrastive study shows that Chinese students are less competent at organizing the long and complicated discourse segments into a coherent text and sometimes they use and in an inappropriate way.And not only plays the role of coordinating ideas of the discourse units but alsocontinues a speaker's action according to Chinese students' data. Chinese students' uses of and which perform this pragmatic function can be displayed by such details as holding the floor, regaining the floor, marking topic transition, initiating the restart and so on. However, Chinese students are lack of employing and on these occasions: and works at both local and global levels of the discourse to mark the topic transition; and marks the speaker's re-entry of the story; and plays both ideational and interactional roles simultaneously.Data analysis also shows that Chinese students' uses of and share similarity with other two DMs i.e. but and or on both ideational and pragmatic functions.Although some limitations can be found, the present study necessarily has its important implications, such as for foreign language teaching and language learning since no pioneering attempt from this perspective has been found with focus upon the study of DMs in the Chinese EFL classroom. This study indicates that, teachers must promote awareness about importance of teaching DMs, as a way of improving students' communication competence. On the other hand, in order to achieve fluency and accuracy in oral English, Chinese college students of non-English major need do more on learning English linguistic and pragmatic knowledge.