| Discourse markers are widely present in people’s daily communication.They are linguistic markers chosen by the speaker to guide and restrict the hearer’s correct understanding of discourse.Since the 1980 s,many scholars have conducted a lot of researches on discourse markers from different perspectives,and have formed three research paradigms: coherence,grammar-pragmatics,and relevance.At present,it can be found that the academic researches on discourse markers mostly concentrate on the teaching field,and the researches on students’ discourse markers are relatively rich.However,there are few researches on teachers’ discourse markers,especially in online courses,and relevant studies only have increased in recent years.This study conducts quantitative and qualitative research on teachers’ discourse markers in online courses,adopts the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson as the theoretical framework,combines the classification of discourse markers by Wang Lifei and Zhu Weihua,and selects two courses in Coursera of America and two courses in MOOC of China as research corpus.This paper analyzes the characteristics,similarities and differences and their reasons,and pragmatic functions of discourse markers in Chinese and American college English teachers by using Jianying software,Text Finisher 5.0,and Antconc 3.5.9.The results show that: In general,college English teachers in both China and America use relatively rich discourse markers in online courses,but they prefer to use simple or single-word discourse markers.The similarities of discourse markers between Chinese and American college English teachers mean that they have the same usage trend,which is related to the particularity of discourse markers and the selected writing courses.Among discourse markers,And,But,Or,and If are the most frequently used.The differences mean that there are significant differences in the types and frequencies of discourse markers between Chinese and American teachers.The types and overall frequencies of discourse markers for American teachers are much higher than those for Chinese teachers.The reasons should be related to Chinese and Western culture,the linguistic differences between China and America,and the length of selected courses.The overall distribution of the position of each discourse marker in the sentence is roughly the same.Discourse markers appear more frequently at the beginning and the middle of sentences,but least at the end of sentences.Moreover,the pragmatic function of discourse markers is closely related to the position in the sentence.This study not only enriches the applied research of discourse markers but also supplements the research of discourse markers by Chinese and foreign teachers based on the corpus method.It is hoped that by comparing and analyzing the situation of discourse markers in Chinese and foreign classroom teachers,this study will help Chinese teachers pay more attention to the characteristics,usage,meaning,and function of discourse markers in the teaching process. |
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