| Writing is one of the basic abilities required in the College English Curriculum.The higher requirements mentioned in the curriculum ask college students to master the ability to write professional English abstract and complete essays in English.Under the background of building First-class universities and disciplines of the world,young scholars are trying to publish their research essays on the international journals to display their academic competence to the whole world.For these purposes,academic English writing courses are popular on the massive open online courses platforms.With the rapid development of network technology,it’s easy for students to receive quality education.Students can learn fantastic courses without time and space limitations.In EFL teaching,language is not only the purpose but also the medium of teaching.Teacher talk plays a dual role in the input and demonstration of target language.Discourse Markers have no influence on the change of teachers’ meaning.But teachers can express and promote the understanding process of students with the help of DMs.On the one hand,the DMs in teacher talk can reduce the cognitive effort of students.On the other hand,these DMs can enhance the accuracy of utterances in teacher talk and avoid misunderstanding of teachers’ intentions.Considering the important functions of DMs in teacher talk,the features of Chinese teachers’ use of DMs is a worth researching topic.Recently,as a terminology in Pragmatics,DM is widely extended to the research in EFL.However,the research mainly focuses on the DMs use on primary and secondary school period.It’s difficult to find out much research on college education period.Based on former research,this thesis takes Relevance Theory as theoretical basis and collects data from two excellent academic English writing courses on China University MOOC and Future Learn platforms.Through quantitative research,this thesis analyzes the similarities and differences of discourse markers uses between Chinese and British teachers.This research is aim to answer the following research questions:(1)What is the overall discourse markers density in teacher talk between Chinese and English teachers?(2)What are the densities of different types of discourse markers in teacher talk between Chinese and English teachers?(3)What are the pragmatic functions of discourse markers in teacher talk between Chinese and English teachers?(4)What are the reasons leading to similarities and differences of discourse markers uses between Chinese and English teachers? Then,this research will provide suggestions for Chinese teachers and improve their DMs use situation in class.The findings are as follows:(1)All the Chinese and British teachers tend to use DMs widely in their teacher talk.The density of used DMs in Chinese teachers’ teacher talk is higher than the statistic of British teachers.For the similarity,this thesis analyzes that because of the valuable functions of DMs,all the teachers incline to apply DMs.DMs can help teachers convey their intentions effectively and promote the understanding process of students.For the difference,this thesis analyzes that Chinese teachers get used to showing many paragraphs on the screen.This may cause that DMs can become more available in the statistic.In addition,Chinese teachers tend to teach the key and difficult points twice with English and Chinese languages.This may lead to the higher frequency of DMs in Chinese teachers’ teacher talk compared with British teachers.(2)The most frequently used DMs in Chinese teachers’ teacher talk are and,or and as.British teachers use and,for and as frequently.All the teachers apply these four DMs as the most used ones.On the one hand,based on Relevance Theory,as typical ones of three types of DMs,these DMs basically cover the frequently used pragmatic functions of DMs.On the other hand,considering massive students with different English levels on the platforms,all Chinese and British teachers prefer to choose the most accessible and comprehensible DMs to construct sentences.(3)All the Chinese and British teachers use and,or,for and as with their wide pragmatic functions.However,there’s a little bit different in using and in their teacher talk.One possible reason may be that as native teachers,British teachers can use DMs to achieve their pragmatic functions flexibly and promote the understanding process of students to smooth the transformation of teaching procedures.For example,in order to overcome the disadvantage of lacking interaction between teacher and online students,British teachers like to use and to convey their implicature to suggest that the class is over and create an interactive atmosphere simultaneously.However,Chinese teachers tend to make a summary statement about what have been taught this week.They incline to use to sum up to make a concluding statement at the end of the class.Then the video is going to be dark which means the class is over.(4)Within Relevance Theory,DMs can constrain and manipulate assumptions during the ostensive-inferential process which can help teachers convey intentions of the utterances effectively.As a result,all Chinese and British teachers get used to applying various DMs according to different context selections.But,the examination-oriented education in China calls for more attention on the meanings of words and sentences for teachers and students which may cause the ignorance of pragmatic functions of DMs.In addition,the development of open courses in Britain universities is followed by China universities which means on the perspective of teaching design,Chinese teachers and British teachers have distinctive features in linking every teaching step fluently online by achieving pragmatic functions of DMs appropriately.Based on the analysis above,this thesis offers following pedagogical implications: First,teachers should improve their DMs use awareness.So they can guide students’ academic English writing more effectively.Second,teachers can change their teaching design by using some functions of DMs to overcome the disadvantage of online courses in which students cannot have active interaction with teachers. |
PDF Full Text Request