The Study Of Discourse Markers’’ Effects On Learners’’ Listening Comprehension

Discourse markers(DMs) have drawn many researchers’ interest in many fields,especially in the field of reading comprehension. However, research on its role in facilitating L2 listening comprehension is different and relatively rare. Among the existing studies on L2 listening comprehension, the findings imply that the effects of DMs on L2 listening comprehension still need to be further explored. The author of this thesis tries to find more evidence to testify the relationship between DMs and listeners’ listening comprehension ability by raising three hypotheses:(1) DMs play a vital role in BEC listening comprehension of overall ideas in the text;(2) DMs play a vital role in BEC listening comprehension at macro-structure level in a text;(3) DMs play a vital role in BEC listening comprehension at micro-structure level in a text.In this thesis, the author adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct an experiment which involves 64 subjects majoring in English. In the process,three BEC listening tests, pre-test and post-tests(one with markers, and the other without markers), are designed to testify the effects of DMs on ESL learners’ listening comprehension. Moreover, a self-assessment listening comprehension survey and interview are supplemented to reflect the learners’ understanding of DMs’ effects on their listening comprehension explicitly. According to the subjects’ actual performance, the paper employs SPSS and the paired t-test to check the significant changes of the tests. By comparing the differences of the results in post-tests and the pre-test, it suggests that DMs facilitate the ESL learners a lot at the micro-structure level(i.e. sentence level) and the overall ideas in the listening text. The effects at the macro-structure level(i.e. discourse level) in the text are not significant.In summary, DMs do aid the ESL learners in the listening comprehension. The author hopes the findings in this paper can give some pedagogical implications for both the teachers and ESL learners.