The Use Of Discourse Markers By Chinese College Students In Written English

Discourse marker is a common language phenomenon. As we all know, thecommunication process is a process for the communicative parties to clearly exchangethe intentions. The discourse markers are one of the necessary means to communicate.They can facilitate in the text organization, arouse the hearers' attention, express thespeakers' emotion and attitude, develop coherent discourse as well as maintain thecommunication naturally. Obviously the functions of discourse markers are rich.Discourse markers are sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk(Schiffrin 1987:31). Discourse marker research originated in 1970s, and ever sincethere has been a wide research interest in this field.The thesis studies how Chinese college students use discourse markers inwritten English on the basis of Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua's classification. It intendsto answer two main questions. The first is whether the use of discourse markers isinfluenced by language proficiency among Chinese college EFL learners. The secondis whether there are significant differences in the use of discourse markers in writtenEnglish between Chinese college students and native speakers. The data used in thisresearch come from two corpora: 1) Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC); and 2)British National Corpus (BNC). The thesis uses the Chinese Learner English Corpus,with the written sub-corpus of the British National Corpus as reference, to investigatehow Chinese college learners use discourse markers in their compositions. In thethesis, the research instrument is Concordance, which is a general-purpose workingtool for the close study of texts, no matter whether the texts are literary, linguistic,historical, religious, philosophical, legal, commercial, or of any other kinds.Concordance has many functions. In the research, its two main functions wordlistsand concordance are mainly adopted to analyze corpus data. Moreover, data collectionprocedure involves three main steps: set up the classification of discourse markers; setup the studied corpora; and compile the chosen data into concordance file and thensort them out. After data collection, the data need to be analyzed. Data analysis consists of two processes. In the first process, the data in ST3 and ST4 are analyzed.In the second process, a comparative analysis on the data of ST3, ST4 and BNC ismade. In the comparative study, a few statistical parameters are chosen: 1) totalfrequency; 2) categories of discourse markers; and 3) discourse markers with thehighest and lowest frequency. During the analysis, some data will be recorded andsettled through Excel, then be analyzed by SPSS.After data analysis, it is found that: (1) The use of discourse markers is notinfluenced by language proficiency among Chinese college EFL learners. (2) Thereare significant differences and similarities in the use of discourse markers betweenChinese college students and native speakers in written English. The differences areembodied in total frequency and in the use of some special discourse markers toexpress various semantic relations. Besides differences, there are also similarities.That can be shown in the choice of discourse markers between Chinese collegestudents and native speakers.The thesis is divided into five chapters: (1) Introduction; (2) Literature review;(3) Methodology; (4) Results and discussion; and (5) Conclusion. Chapter One isintroduction. It presents the language phenomenon—discourse markers and analyzesit simply. The origin, significance, objectives of the study and the framework of thethesis are introduced respectively. Chapter Two is literature review. It makes a generalreview on related domestic and foreign researches into discourse markers. ChapterThree focuses on the research method in respect of research questions, researchsubjects, instruments, and data collection as well as data analysis procedures. ChapterFour concentrates on the results and discussion. Chapter Five is conclusion. Itconcludes the study of discourse markers and points out the limitations and theaspects needed to be improved.