A Study of Discourse Markers Employed in College English Writing by Non-English Majors

: Discourse marker is a common language phenomenon in verbal communication including parts of conjunctions, adverbs, interjections, some phrases and small words. From the perspective of grammar, these modifiers do not have many a semantic meanings and they are less related to the sentences. However, from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse, discourse marker plays the role of organizing the discourse, attracting the hearer’s attention, and expressing the emotion and attitude of the speaker. In the process of utterance generation and understanding, discourse marker works as a signal or makes the information clear so that the hearer can obtain the communicative intention of the speaker easily, thus producing the contextual effect. Based on the framework of Relevance Theo ry by Sperber and Wilson, this essay adopts Fraser’s classification of discourse markers, analyzing the use of discourse markers by non-English majors in Guangxi region. The result of this research shows that discourse markers indeed play a crucial role in the process of utterance generation and understanding, and the correct use of discourse markers contributes to the cohesion of discourse or text and the improvement of the student’s writing ability.


Introduction
Most languages in the world have a range of words or lexical expressions, which do not belong to any of the major syntactic categories, which do not indicate objects, events or properties, and whose meanings do not seem to contribute to the conceptual meaning of utterances in which they occur [4] , but work as informative markers.These words or lexical expressions are called discourse markers (hereafter as DMs).DM is a linguistic device which a speaker adopts to convey his or her intention clearly.DMs can constrain and guide a hearer's choice of his or her cognitive environment while processing the speaker's utterances.The function of DM employed in the speaker's utterance is to help the hearer to find the optimal relevance, and the hearer also can achieve the maximum cognitive effect with minimum mental efforts.Furthermore, DMs are frequently used to make the essay coherent and logical in English essay writing, so it is important to help students to master DMs skillfully and use them correctly.

Research Design
Owing to research scholars' studies on DMs from different perspectives and dimensions for their purposes, the term DM is given different labels.Furthermore, the differences can also be found in the dimension of classifications of DMs.Halliday classifies DMs into three logic-semantic types, that is, elaboration, extension, and enhancement in Cohesion in English [3] .Based on the framework of Relevance Theory, Blackmore is the first person to study DMs from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective [1] .Romero divides DMs into involvement markers and operative markers [5] .After making a series of study, Fraser has further classified DMs into fifteen categories from the syntacticpragmatic point [2] .

Research Subjects
This essay aims to investigate the operative situation of DMs in English writings by Chinese university non-English majors.100 students from Guilin University of Technology constituted the participants of the study.All of them are sophomores from different majors of different faculties.Additionally, they have attended CET-4.Their ages generally range from 19 to 21 years old.All of them have learnt English for more than seven years from middle school to now, so it is considered they share the similar English teaching experience under a common English teaching system.Furthermore, they have mastered the basic grammar and a relative amount of vocabulary.

Research Samples
The research samples are composed by two parts: one part is 100 argumentative writings by college non-English majors from the final test papers and the other is 100 argumentative examples which are chosen from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC).
The first part of the data includes 100 argumentative writings by non-English majors.The reason why final test papers are chosen as research samples rather than writing workbooks is that they are more formal and standard.The reason for choosing argumentative writings is that argumentative writing is a basic demanding task, and they are all required to master the argumentative writing skills, so they practice it frequently in their daily exercises.Another key reason for choosing argumentative writing is that argumentative writing mainly concerns with complex logical relations.In addition, it is bound up with the structure of the argumentation.The structure of the argumentation consists of three parts, namely introduction, body part, and conclusion.In the process of writing, especially argumentative writing, some signal words are used to make the writing more coherent and logical, and these words are DMs because of their functions.In their final examination, all of the subjects are required to write an English composition in thirty minutes with at least 120 words with the tip of some Chinese sentences.That is to say, they must control the time and the words strictly for a certain extent.
The other part of the data is chosen from CLEC.CLEC is chiefly cataloged by Gui Shichun in 2003, and it covers five kinds of corpora.All of corpora are about compositions which collected from the whole nation but aimed at different subjects.It can be divided into three parts, the first part is aimed at middle school students, the second part is aimed at college students who are preparing for CET-4 and CET-6, and the last part is aimed at English majors.In this study, the second part is chosen, college students, as research samples because of the purpose of this study.Another reason for choosing this part as samples is that it is often utilized by non-English learner as learning material.However, considering the quantity of the compositions, this thesis randomly selects 100 argumentative compositions with the topic of "Practice Makes Perfect".

Research Instruments
Based on the framework of the classification of DMs by Fraser, this paper makes use of comparative method to analyze the writings by non-English majors' college students and writings chosen from CLEC.Fraser's classification is more detailed and covers all kinds of DMs, but this essay just only focuses on five types of DMs because they are frequently used in argumentative writing to make the discourse cohesive and logical.What is more, these five types of DMs play an important role in the organization of discourse.These five kinds of DMs are sequential marker, contrastive marker, inferential marker, elaborative marker and self-assessment marker.

Research Procedures
Totally, three stages are included in the whole research project.First of all, 100 writings from the sophomores of non-English majors were collected.In order to obtain a more objective result, two experienced teachers, who have graded the writing part of the CET-4 and CET-6, are invited to review the collected students' writings according to the writing standard for evaluation of CET-4 and CET-6.Secondly, with the help of friend who has conducted a study on college students' writing and adviser, CLEC and the argumentative writings are collected easily.Thirdly, taking Fraser's classification of DMs as the theoretical framework, the inappropriate usage of DMs in writings by non-English majors are discussed in the first step, then, it is the problematic use of DMs in CLEC.Last, comparison between writings from non-English majors and those from CLEC were made.

Total Number of Discourse Markers Used in Samples
The following two tables show the general information of the use of certain DMs in the sample writings.From each table, it can be seen that the number of the DMs are used under each category.After a rough analysis of those two tables, it shows that the top two DMs are SAM and IM.Nevertheless, CM and IM ranked in the top two positions in the writings from CLEC.From the statistics on DMs showed in the above two tables, it can be seen that students know the functions of the DMs and tend to employ DMs to make their writings cohesive and cohesive to build a perfect organization.However, there are problematic uses in their writings, and concrete analysis will be conducted in the following sections.

Sequential Discourse Markers
After analysis of the use of DMs in the collected non-English majors' argumentative writings, the results demonstrate that most students prefer to employ these patterns to support the organization of their writings, such as "first…second…last but not least…", "firstly…sec-ondly…finally…", etc.There are two reasons explaining these common phenomena by analysis of collected writings.On the one hand, these patterns are easy and convenient for the students to achieve discourse coherence, especially for the students whose English is poor.On the other hand, the teachers always require the students to pay more attention to the correctness of the vocabulary and sentence, paying less attention to the structure of the discourse, discourse coherence and logicality.Even some teachers encourage students to apply these fixed formats so that the students can get high marks to pass exam.Those two reasons lead to the mechanical use of sequential DMs in the writings, and this phenomenon is very common in writings written by students whose English is poor.
Although it is a convenient way to achieve the discourse coherence by employing these fixed formats, there are still other problematic uses of sequential DMs in the writings.The concrete situation is listed on the following table.Because of the aim of this thesis, the problematic and inappropriate uses of DMs in the selected writings from CLEC are also listed in the same table beside the students' problematic use of DMs.Contrasted the students' writings to the writings from CLEC, the results show that there are similar problematic uses of sequential DM, such as the sequential DM "(and) then".The investigation also shows that the non-English majors have a special preference for those fixed formats in their writings, while those fixed formats are never employed in the writings from CLEC.Table 3 shows the total number of sequential DMs employed in writings by two groups.The specific statistics in Table 3 indicate that the number of sequential DMs which are used in writings by non-English majors is up to 56.

Contrastive Discourse Markers
Table 4 shows the study on the problematic use of contrastive DMs, mainly including although, however, but, on the other hand, conversely and otherwise.The function of contrastive DMs is to press the ideas or either a denial or a contrast of some proposition associated with the preceding discourse.While in many writing examples, contrastive DM however is inappropriately used.All of them are failure to make contrastive proposition associated with the preceding discourse.According to what the authors want to express, the marker however is not appropriate.Besides the misuse of contrastive DMs at the discourse level in writing, there are also mistakes at the grammar level.The marker although is always used to indicate the contrastive relation between two ideas, alternative speaking, there must be two contrastive ideas mentioned in one sentence.However, the writer only mentions one thing in his writing rather than contrasting it with another.The use of the marker in writing totally violates the grammar rule.The problematic use is caused by students who don't master the grammar rule of the use of the marker although.In addition, there are redundant uses of marker conversely in writings by non-English majors.

Inferential Discourse Markers
In the article writing, the inferential DMs are applied to display the relationship between sentence, such as the conditional relation, causal relationship, etc.The statistics on the Table 5 shows the investigation on DMs that the marker so is frequently used in the collected writings and the critical issue is the abuse of so.Based on data analysis, there are examples represent a typical Chinese-English collocation in Chinese students' writings.The collocation of because…so… is transferred negatively by Chinese learners.They think that the correlative conjunctions "yinwei…suoyi…" in Chinese is the equivalent of the English collocation of because…so…

Elaborative Discourse Markers
Table 6 shows the study of elaborative DMs which cover what's more, and, besides, furthermore, in addition, and not only…but also…And this kind of DMs are often used to add information to refine or complete the preceding statements.However, the students have a preference for these markers in their writings, such as what's more, and, not only…but also and in addition.Especially, the marker and is the most frequently used one; it is also the randomly used one and tends to be colloquial.

Self-assessment Discourse Markers
The study on self-assessment DMs mainly covers in my opinion, as far as I am concerned, I think, I believe, as for me, and in my view.According to the following Table 7, in the non-English majors' writings, it has been found that the phrase I think is highly inappropriately used, followed by as far as I'm concerned and in my view.There is a common phenomenon that the sequential DM I think often appears after some other DMs in students' writings, such as "As far as I concerned, I think…", "In my opinion, I think…", "However, I think…", "But, I think…, so, I think", etc.These kinds of patterns of I think are applied as reinforcement to stress the author's view, assessment, or evaluation to the present messages.
Besides those inappropriate uses of sequential DM I think, there are also wrongly used words and phrases at lexical level, such as in my opinions, as far as I know and Thirdly, students' wrong attitudes need to be corrected by the teacher.Some students deem that the overuse of some DMs can make the relevance and coherence of the writing more perfect.To avoid this inappropriate use of certain DMs, the teacher must remind the students that the overuse of DMs will not contribute to the structure of the writing but interrupt it.
Finally, students tend to find equivalents between the mother language and target language in the foreign language learning process, so the teacher should make efforts to help students avoid unnecessary mistakes.
Generally speaking, mastery of the usage of DMs can help the students to write coherent writings and make the organization of writings logical, so the teacher should pay more attention to how to use DMs appropriately in writings in ordinary teaching process.

Table 1 .
Description of DMs used in non-English majors' writings

Table 2 .
Description of DMs used in CLEC

Table 3 .
Problematic use of sequential markers in the collected writings

Table 4 .
Problematic use of contrastive discourse markers in collected writings

Table 5 .
Problematic use of inferential discourse markers in collected writings

Table 6 .
Problematic use of elaborative discourse markers in collected writings

Table 7 .
Problematic use of self-assessment discourse markers in collected writings