A Contrastive Study On The Use Of Discourse Markers Between Chinese Middle School Teachers And American Middle School Teachers

During the past two decades, many scholars at home and abroad conduct the research ofdiscourse markers from different perspectives. Some scholars make the research of discoursemarkers from the coherent perspective; some scholars make the research fromgrammatical-pragmatic perspective; and some scholars make the research from relevantperspective. This author analyzes the reasons about the different usage on discourse markersbetween Chinese and American teachers form the pragmatic functional perspective.The research questions involved in the research paper will be presented in the following.(1) Is there any difference in the distribution of discourse markers, which are used byAmerican and Chinese middle school teachers? Is the difference significant?(2) Why doesthere exist significant difference of discourse markers’ frequency between American andChinese middle school teachers’ discourses?(3) What is the suggestion for improving thecorrect usage of discourse markers of Chinese EFL teachers in middle school? The writer willcombine qualitative method and quantitative method together to answer these three questions.This paper involves the data both Chinese middle school English teachers’ classroomdiscourse and the American middle school teachers’ classroom discourses. The Chinesediscourses are from the eighth national middle school teachers’ teaching competition. TheAmerican discourses are from ClassBank English Corpus, which is the subproject ofAmerican TalkBank international data project and established in2004. This paper will useAntConc3.2.0software and Log likelihood calculator. Besides, when the frequency is zero,the author will use formula to calculate in person. Through analyzing the reasons of differentfrequency on discourse markers, it is possible to draw the following conclusions. Thefrequency of discourse markers between Chinese English teachers and American teachers isdifferent, and some are significant difference. Through analyzing the pragmatic functions ofdiscourse markers, the author finds that pragmatic fossilization is an important reasonaccounting for the different frequency(some individual discourse markers exists thephenomenon of pragmatic generalization and pragmatic failure, the author will explain themindividually).Besides, the author finds that first language transfer, especially pragmatictransfer is the fundamental reasons for different frequency. The language input is also theimportant reason for different frequency of discourse markers. The author also finds that someindividual teachers are inclined to use some discourse markers; this phenomenon belongs toteachers’ personal reasons. The research results can provide a reference for Chinese English teachers to improvetheir classroom English. The research results can also offer a suggestion for Chinese middleschool English teachers, English learners, even for course designers. English teachers andEnglish learners should try to avoid the negative influence caused by first language negativetransfer, and pay attention to the correct, appropriate comprehensible input of discoursemarkers. The course designer should consciously increase the knowledge of discoursecoherence to improve their utterance coherence and the ability of using discourse markers forteachers and learners.