A Corpus-Based Study Of The Use Of Discourse Markers By Chinese English Majors In Argumentative Writing

Discourse Markers are effective language devices widely used by writers in argumentative writing in hopes of achieving relevance by constraining the range of possible interpretations of the utterance and hence reducing readers’ processing effort.Nowadays,even though teachers have realized the importance of discourse markers,it still confuses them how to guide students to use discourse markers properly,specifically,what and how to teach.This research aims to make a contrastive study on the use of discourse markers in argumentative essays written by Chinese English majors and by native speakers of English.It adopts corpus-based quantitative analysis to study discourse markers in argumentative writing from the perspective of relevance theory.The main research questions are as follows:(1)Compared with native speakers,what are the main features of the use of discourse markers by Chinese English majors in argumentative writing?(2)What are the features of the use of the discourse markers in argumentative essays written by English majors from grade one to four?To answer these questions,this study uses the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL)as an observation corpus and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)as a reference corpus.Compared with native speakers of English,Chinese English majors rely too much on discourse markers to realize corresponding pragmatic functions,which can be attributed to instructional effect and negative transfer of mother tongue.The study yields the following findings:(1)Chinese English majors overuse discourse markers that function to achieve the contextual effect of strengthening existing assumptions,especially listing and additive discourse markers.(2)When indicating causal relations,Chinese English majors tend to use inferential discourse markers,while native speakers of English tend to use causal discourse markers.(3)Chinese English majors overuse discourse markers with colloquial features and lack the use of discourse markers with written features.(4)They tend to use some of the most common and familiar discourse markers,and these words and phrases are usually learned and mastered in their early English learning process.(5)With the improvement of language proficiency,Chinese English majors gradually reduce the excessive use of additive,inferential and contrastive discourse markers,and their underuse of causal discourse markers is also alleviated.However,it shows no significant change in terms of the overuse of listing and summative discourse markers.Based on these findings,this study offers some pedagogical implications for teachers on the instruction of discourse markers in argumentative writing:(1)provide pre-emptive negative evidence of overuse and underuse discourse markers to raise students’ awareness of monitoring their use of discourse markers in argumentative writing.(2)develop students’ awareness of the distinction between written form and colloquial form.(3)set priority to the instruction of the types of discourse markers that show little improvement with the development of language proficiency.(4)offer more options of discourse markers realizing the same function to enrich the variety of discourse markers in their writing.(5)provide authentic reading materials as input for the purpose of developing students’ appropriate use of discourse markers in context.