Discourse Markers and Their Functions in L2 Teachers’ Speech and Their Relation to Gender

In recent years there has been a growing attention to the analysis of discourse and DMs. Discourse in thewords of Williamson-Loga (2003), is defined as a series of ideas connected together to create a text. DMs as linguisticdevices are considered as lexical expressions which relate discourse segments together (Fraser, 1999) and play animportant role in conversational coherence (Christodoulidou, 2011). There are some elements, such as gender, whichmay have impacts on investigating discourse and specifically DMs. This study investigated how this factor correlateswith using DMs in spoken discourse and was conducted with the aim of developing a description of spoken English witha special focus on DMs. With the aim of investigating DMs’ functions and frequencies in Iranian non-native discourse,this study was carried out on Iranian teachers. To analysis the functions of DMs, Fung and Carter’s (2007) table offunctions was adopted. Spoken samples were gathered, transcribed, and analyzed in order to find the differencebetween functions and frequency of DMs across gender. The results showed no significant gender difference in terms offrequency of using DMs with different functions between Iranian L2 teachers.

Keywords:

Discourse Markers , Gender , L2 Teachers