THE EFFECTCONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING TASKS ON IMPROVING EFL STUDENTS' USE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN SPEAKING

Abstract

The investigation described in this dissertation aims at studying some aspects of spoken discourse which are discourse markers, and will consider in particular the production of those devices by EFL students of English as well as the effect of consciousness-raising tasks on improving discourse competence and communicative language performance of non-native speakers of English in Algeria. In this context, the case of first year Algerian LMD students in the English department, at the University of Algiers 2 is considered. Indeed, discourse markers of spoken English, such as " you know, I mean, well, see, so, and, but, ...etc" perform an important function in conversation. They have been the subject of investigation in a host of studies focusing on native and non-native speakers and have been assigned a multitude of terminologies and various definitions by several researchers; however, no research has been conducted as far as Algerian EFL learners are concerned. Therefore, the present study will try to answer some issues related to Algerian students' awareness about these items, their usage as well as the factors affecting the latter. Accordingly, a quasi experimental research was adopted consisting of two groups of twenty (20) students each belonging to first year LMD: one constitutes the experimental group while the other represents the control one. The experiment was conducted in three phases during which three techniques were adopted in the collection of the required data; i.e. we employed two written tests (a pre- test and a post- test), two interviews (from which we derived student corpora) and a questionnaire.

The study reveals some development in the students' discourse competence as far as the use of spoken discourse markers is concerned; nevertheless, a discrepancy is noticed in the frequency and use of those targeted features when compared with a sub- corpus of native speakers' talks containing 460,050 words, already employed by Fung and Carter (2007: 417), selected from the whole CANCODE pedagogical corpus. The latter comprises 5 million words of English spontaneous speech recorded in a variety of situations namely: transactional, pedagogical, socializing and intimate. Besides, Algerian EFL learners' speaking skill has evolved considerably in comparison with their output before receiving instruction. Nevertheless, they did not reach natives' level of proficiency. Moreover, the investigation unveiled that some discourse markers were overused or underused whereas others were misused or not used at all. Thus, four categories of spoken discourse markers users were distinguished. These included: over users, under users, misusers and no users. Additionally, the findings attributed the reasons affecting Algerian EFL learners' use/ non-use of those discourse devices to three major factors. These include: situational anxiety, delay and inadequate English proficiency.