81006684

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Pedagogical Implications of the Corpus-based Investigation of Discourse Markers

English (英語)

Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World

1

227-254

神戸大学国際コミュニケーションセンター

2013-03-23

2014-06-24

The use of discourse markers (DMs) is a prominent feature in spoken English. Most of the previous studies of DMs investigated the speech of native speakers. Little research has investigated the speech of non-native speakers. The discussion of the functions of DMs is problematic, because DMs are produced unconsciously or subconsciously: this is difficult to demonstrate unequivocally as the function of any DM may be open to interpretation, when factoring variables such as context and the unseen paralinguistic features of the discourse. This paper, based on an analysis of three corpora: The Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), MICASE and ICE-GB, reports the use of such DMs as oh, well, like, and I think. These DMs, seen in a new light, are interpreted on the basis of their co-occurring linguistic evidence and contexts. This investigation will likely have many implications for and applications to English Language Teaching, which lacks materials for the teaching of DMs. This paper suggests that some aspects can probably be taught through consciousness-raising activities and the data-driven learning (Johns, 1991) approach and that materials can be made from existing corpora, such as MICASE and LINDSEI. The pedagogical value of teaching DMs is dependent on learning context. To conclude, this paper acknowledges the limitations and weaknesses of this study and makes suggestions for future research.

紀要論文