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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of research
Words such as ok, all right, um, well, so and you know are commonly believed notto contain propositional meaning. Later, people do “have a sense for a prototypicalmeaning or function for um/uh, you know, and like” (Fox Tree, 2007), which aresimilar to what academic research has found.Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are very important in spoken interaction(Carter and McCarthy, 2006). Some research has been conducted on the DMs inspoken English (Schiffrin, 1987; Anderson, 1998; Aijmer, 2002). Rendle-Short (2000,2003) indicates that lecturers in computer science seminars employ certain DMs todirect the audience to the framework of the discourse. Also, Swales and Malczewski(2001) note that DMs play a significant role by means of a corpus study: words whichlecturers and professors use to signal a change in topic or activity. However, relativelylimited attention has been paid to DMs used in classroom interactive discourse,especially in Chinese EFL middle school pedagogical settings, where discourse ismore formal than that of casual conversation and “certain tokens or sequences maynot occur in the environments they ordinarily inhabit in everyday talk” (Zimmerman& Boden, 1991). The exploration of this type of research is on the basis of theinitiation-response-evaluation / feedback (IRE) structure as well as the ways thatteachers and students conduct these three parts of classroom discourse. Since ChineseEFL middle school classroom teaching is structured on a highly planned lesson andparticipants impart knowledge and convey information by the IRE sequence with theaudience. So on the level of Chinese EFL middle school discourse it is of great valueto research teachers’ use of DMs in classroom interactions in China.
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1.2 Research questions
As is stated in 1.1, the study examines DMs used by English model teachers andstudent teachers in Chinese EFL pedagogical settings drawing upon two small-scalecorpora: MMSTCDC, a corpus of model middle school English teacher classroomdiscourse and STCDC, a corpus of English student teacher classroom discourse.Specifically, it investigates the similarities and differences of the DM uses betweenmodel teachers and student teachers from a functional linguistic perspective. Thefollowing research questions will be addressed in this study:
1. Which DMs are employed by the teachers? How frequently are these DMs used in EFL classroom discourse?
2. What are the functions of the DMs used in Chinese EFL classroom by teachers?
3. What are the similarities and differences of DM uses in terms of their functionsbetween model teachers and student teachers? What are the reasons for the similaritiesand differences?
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Chapter 2 Literature review

2.1 Definition of DMs
An extensive body of studies has dealt with the linguistic element of DM, andhas yielded a great number of different terms. These terms are cue phrases (Knoft andDale, 1994), discourse connectives (Blackmore, 1987), pragmatic connectives (vanDijk, 1979; Stubbs, 1983), sentence connectives (Halliday and Hasan, 2001), phaticconnectives (Bazanella,1990), pragmatic markers (Fraser, 1988), discourse markers(Schiffrin, 1987; Lenk, 1998; Schourup, 1999), discourse operators (Redeker,本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。