A PRE–REQUISITE TO SOCIALIZING NON–NATIVE LEARNERS INTO DISCOURSE MARKERS USE

Mgr. Silvie Valkova

Volume : VI, Issue : II, February - 2016

A PRE–REQUISITE TO SOCIALIZING NON–NATIVE LEARNERS INTO DISCOURSE MARKERS USE

Mgr. Silvie Valkova

Abstract :

The mastery in foreign language acquisition is achieved not only by appropriateness and fluency but also by socializing non–native speakers into the strategies of target language use. The present paper focuses on discourse markers (DMs) as widely discussed communicatively–regulative units of language (Leech, 1984), and approaches them as overt language manifestations of interpersonal and textual metafunctions (Halliday, 2009). A ief outline of a theoretical ‘roadmap’ will be followed by a survey of parameters found relevant for socializing Czech university students of English into appropriate use of DMs. Though there is nothing compared to native speakers’ tacit knowledge, a reasonable step to sounding more English–like in this domain can be achieved by learning more about the subsystem of language to which DMs belong, the mechanism of their distribution in discourse and the strategies of their use, as emergent from language corpora.