Discourse Markers Of Native English Learners In Debate

With the continuous improvement and expansion of China’s international status and influence,more and more people are learning Chinese in the world.The ultimate goal of Chinese learners is to be able to freely use Chinese in oral communication.As a common phenomenon in oral communication,discourse markers play an important role in maintaining discourse coherence,highlighting the speaker’s emotional attitude,and helping teachers to understand the learning situation of Chinese learners.Therefore,mastering discourse markers is of great significance to help Chinese learners master Chinese knowledge and improve their oral communication level.This study takes relevance theory and systemic-functional grammar as the main theoretical framework,takes the third season of the language program Informal Talks as the source of corpus,takes two native English learners in the program as the research object,limits the language form to the special form of debate,and builds a selfconstructed corpus to analyze the use of discourse markers among native English learners.First of all,by collecting,transliterating and checking the corpus of the third season of Informal Talks,this research obtains a corpus about the speech of Chinese learners who are native English speakers in the debate session.The frequency and location of discourse markers in the corpus are analyzed and summarized.Secondly,based on relevant results such as the occurrence frequency of discourse markers obtained from the corpus,this study selects three discourse markers "is","I think" and "this" as the key analysis objects,and analyzes the process,location and function of discourse markers through corpus analysis and graphical presentation.It is found that discourse markers "is" and "this" appear more often at the beginning of non-sentences,and their main functions include: continuing the topic,demonstrating the thinking process,highlighting the content after discourse markers,and explaining.Discourse marker "I think" appears at the beginning of a sentence in many cases,and its main functions include:establishing and introducing the topic,seizing the sentence round,etc.After clarifying the functions of discourse markers such as "is","I think" and "this",this study continues to analyze the errors prone to appear in their use,namely redundancy and misuse.The three main causes of bias are negative transfer of mother tongue,learning experience and avoidance strategy.Finally,this study puts forward relevant suggestions on discourse markers from the perspectives of textbooks,teachers and learners.From the perspective of teaching materials,the teaching materials of Chinese learners should be more detailed in the annotation of discourse marks and improve the recurrence rate.From the perspective of learners,Chinese learners should face up to the learning of discourse markers and pay attention to the influence of the differences between Chinese and English on learning Chinese.From the perspective of teachers,teachers should pay attention to the normalization of discourse labeling teaching,adopt diversified ways to practice students’ oral English,and pay attention to the influence of negative transfer of native language of learners with different native languages.