A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Discourse Arkers In Spoken English Between Chinese University Students And The Native Speakers

Discourse markers are common discourse segments in both spoken and written English. Since1970s, discourse markers have been a new topic in discourse analysis and pragmatic studies.(Printon,1996, Jucker and Ziv1998). Linguistics, pragmatic linguistics in particular have made extensive research on it. Since1990s, the language phenomenon has attracted scholars in China. On the contrary, Chinese scholars in this field have not done much research as other countries. The aims of the paper is to find in what ways the Chinese EFL students are different from native speakers in using of discourse markers in the process of speech. And then it tries to explore the causes and possible solution to it.The present study investigates the most frequently used discourse markers in daily spoken English, such as’well’,’you know’and’I think’. The study compares SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners) with BNC (British National Corpus), a native corpus, and analyzes the types, frequencies and pragmatic functions of14commonly used discourse markers in English by means of analyzing the corpus linguistic.The finding shows that Chinese EFL students do not employ discourse markers as often as native speakers do, while they overuse ’I think’. The results indicate that Chinese EFL learners do not have a good knowledge of usage and functions of discourse markers. So it is a habit to use discourse markers that are familiar to them. Students are afraid of making mistakes or they are not confident enough to have a try. Both the teachers and students do not pay much attention to it. Finally, pedagogical methods are put forward to solution on English teaching and learning. In addition, limitation and direction for future research are also presented.