An Empirical Study Of The Use Of Discourse Markers By English Major Undergraduates In China

Discourse markers(henceforth DMs)are widely employed in most languages and have been a focus of discourse analysis and pragmatic research.DMs were considered as meaningless fillers in speech until 1950 s,but following the development of researches on everyday language,people started to realize that DMs are actually crucial to promoting discourse coherence,improving interpersonal relationship and thereby achieving successful communication.In this thesis,the author will make a comparison between native speakers' and Chinese college English major undergraduates' use of the DM I mean2 through analyzing the corpora,i.e.Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English(Part 1)and Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0(Task 3);then,the study will adopt Pearson correlation analyses to investigate if frequent input of DM I mean can assist Chinese college English major undergraduates in understanding its each function,and if their understanding in this respect can positively contribute to their actual use of I mean.Based on the above results findings,the study will ultimately offer corresponding pedagogical implications.The results of the corpus analysis indicate that English major students in China significantly underuse DM I mean,and they normally solely use I mean as a hesitation marker and a self-repair marker.Through Pearson correlation analyses,the author discovers that native English speakers' frequent use of I mean does not have a significant positive impact on Chinese college English major undergraduates' understanding of each function of I mean,but Chinese college English major undergraduates' understanding in this respect can actually positively contribute to their use of I mean to some degree.It can be seen that in ESL classes,simply increasing the input frequency of DMs is not enough,whereas it is also crucial to promote students' ability to understand pragmatic functions of DMs.To improve students' understanding of DMs' pragmatic functions,not only the literal meanings of DMs but also the contexts in which DMs are used should be specified.In addition,curriculum designers also ought to enhance the status of discourse markers in EFL teaching in China.