The Cognitive And Pragmatic Representation Of Discourse Markers

Discourse Markers (DM) are a common linguistic phenomena in written and orallanguage. DMs usually perform certain functions in discourse with procedural meaning but noeffect on the truth-value of sentences. They are always used to indicate the logical relationbetween discourses.Because of the different points of view and different aims, scholars have their owndefinition of DM. The thesis integrates several scholars’ definition and then give a workingdefinition on DM from the cognitive and pragmatic perspective. The thesis also illustrates thethree important functions of DM: interactional function, attitudinal function and textualfunction. In additon, the thesis gives an applicable classification according to differentscholars.The author interviewed seven English teachers of Senior grade Two to know thesituation about the teaching of senior English writing. Besides, the author also gets the senior2students of two classes to complete a questionnaire to investigate the situation about thesenior high school students’ learning of English writing.This thesis aims to seek the deficiency in the teaching on DM through the case analysisof one English teacher’s writing lesson,as well as the English teacher’s cognition of DM. Thepaper finds out two problems through the research:(1) the teaching on DM lacks certainexplanition;(2) the teacher gets students to apply some high-frequency DM mechanically.Meanwhile, the author take a certain number of compositions of2classes’s students and findout5problems about the use of DM existed in students’ compositions:(1) the students useDMs with high frequency;(2) the variety of the DMs used in compositions is limited;(3)DMs are overused or used mechanically;(4) DMs are used defficiently;(5) DMs are misused.This study verify a reality that there are some problems existed in the teaching of Englishwriting.At last, the thesis put forward some constructive suggetions owing to the problemsexisted in the English writing teaching and learning, and hopes to improve the English writingteaching in order to help students to develop their writing ability.