Resumen de Discourse Markers in Native and Learner Spoken English: Implications for Pedagogy
Do Thi Quy, Richard B. Baldauf Jr.
Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic elements that signal relations between units of talk (Schiffrin, 1987) and are claimed to be of crucial importance in improving L2 learners’ communicative competence. However, little is known about their usage by non-native speakers. To explore the extent to which L2 learners can use these linguistic features in their spoken language, the present study investigated the production of discourse markers in spoken English by native speakers and learners of English based on 300-minutes of recordings of twelve dyadic conversations between advanced Vietnamese EFL learners and Australian-English native speakers. The findings indicated that the production of discourse markers was statistically different between the native and learner corpora, with many fewer DMs used by the EFL speakers across all of the common markers employed by the native speakers. Of the four categories of DM functions investigated, the EFL learners were found to more frequently produce formal functions while the natives were inclined to use more casual and discoursal functions. The study results highlight the problems experienced by L2 learners in acquiring discourse markers, raise the significance of discourse markers for pedagogic settings, and provide some possible pedagogic implications for the types of DMs that EFL learners should use to make their interactions as natural as those of native speakers, thereby improving their language comprehensibility.
