A Research Of Pragmatic Funcitons Of Discourse Markers In EFL Classes

It is widely acknowledged that discourse markers, as important constituents ofteacher talk in class, ifinction to facilitate students’ interpretation of teachers’ speeches,and influence students’ future communication as well. Thus, research on teachers’DMs has been one of the most important areas in classroom research.In this research, teacher talks of middle school English teachers are chosen as theplatform and discourse markers within teacher talk are actually the researching focus.This is a data-based research. All the data are obtained by means of class recordingand observations in classrooms of middle schools in both Shanghai and Nanjing andthen by means of repeated listening and transcribing. The ifnal data-base isestablished.Through classroom research, this study intends to ifnd out pragmatic functions ofteachers’ DMs, as well as to summarize a categorization of DMs in teacher talks.The main findings of this study are summairzed as follows: Firstly, middleschool English teachers are using limited numbers of DMs, in that they tend toregularly and repeatedly employ some DMs such as OK, or, and, yes, now, all right，then, and so on. Secondly, one DM may have more than one function in differentoccasions, and the main functions of DMs in teaching include:(1) explaining;(2) turntaking and turn giving;(3) responding;(4) time gap iflling;(5) attention arousing;(6)topic switching;(7) exemplifying;(8) reversing. Thirdly, there are some inappropriateapplications of discourse markers in middle school teaching discourses.The thesis, placing the research emphasis on the discourse markers, establishesthe preliminary framework for the pragmatic functions of discourse markers so as tosummarize their pragmatic functions, providing reference for the futrher research ofin-class discourse markers. Furthermore, the corpus of the two middle schoolscollected by the author can be served as the materials for the research of classroom corpus. Finally，the thesis points out the misuses of discourse markers made byEnglish teachers of middles schools, offeirng reference for the enhancement ofteachers’ language quality to some extent.