Discourse Management Markers in High School EFL Classroom Discourse: An Interactional and Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

As an irreplaceable component of teacher talk, discourse management markers (DMMs) act as prompters in EFL classes, which can facilitate the understanding and interactions between teachers and EFL learners. By doing qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study adopted a multi-layered study design, and the data were selected from the teaching videos of six EFL teachers. Through the analysis of the collected data, three conclusions are drawn. Firstly, among all the DMMs, Attention markers (AMs) are the most frequently used DMMs in the selected teachers’ discourse. Secondly, DMMs within different modes in EFL micro-classroom contexts may serve for various interactional and cognitive functions, such as signaling sequential relationship for learners, inviting for co-construction, marking topic changes, maintaining genuine linguistic communication, denoting the thinking process, reducing cognitive interference in seeking relevance, and foregrounding to channel attention. Thirdly, there are overuse and underuse of certain DMMs in terms of teachers’ actual use of DMMs.